After years of success bringing earthbound superheroes to the big screen, Marvel Studios opened eyes when it first endeavored to make a film out of “Guardians of the Galaxy.” If Iron Man was once considered an obscure Marvel hero, these guys were total D-league. Yet surprising to no one, the studio’s creative process has yielded […]

In a post-“Avengers” comic book movie universe, bigger is not only better, but also necessary. Leave it to original “X-Men” and “X2” director Bryan Singer to get the whole gang together (old and new) in order to bring one of the biggest “X-Men” story lines to the big screen in attention-grabbing fashion. “X-Men: Days of […]

  As the world’s most popular superhero, Spider-Man is the poster hero for the resurgence of the superhero genre at the movies, but these days he’s hanging there by a strand of webbing. When Sony gave Peter Parker a reboot in 2012’s “The Amazing Spider-Man,” they became the first studio to recast and reimagine an entire […]

If you’ve ever wondered how cool it would be if a superhero movie was combined with an espionage thriller, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is a dream come true. It’s as much “The Rogers Ultimatum” as it is an irresistibly cool blockbuster, and though a totally different film than the quality origin story of “Captain […]

Most moviegoers probably didn’t realize Thor was a comic book character in the Marvel universe before his big-screen debut in 2011. Flash forward just two and a half years later and Chris Hemsworth has portrayed the Norse god of thunder three times already. “Thor: The Dark World” looks to continue riding the post-“Avengers” wave, but […]

Throughout the course of the modern superhero era, one thing has stayed true: Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. After being a successful piece of the “X-Men” franchise for three films, Wolverine got his own solo gig in 2009’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” which turned out to be a chaotic smear of superhero film with a cliché-ridden script. […]

In this superhero-obsessed culture/Hollywood world we live in, it’s a wonder that the grand-daddy of them all, Superman, hasn’t had a successful debut in the 21st Century. Obviously I’ve just implicitly bashed 2006’s “Superman Returns,” which I will not be taking the time to discuss beyond this sentence, but I don’t think anyone disagrees that […]

How will Marvel’s universe ever be the same after “The Avengers”? There’s bound to be a vocal percentage of viewers who walk out of “Iron Man 3” thinking, “why didn’t he just call his superfriends in the end?” It’s a good question, one that Drew Pearce and Shane Black’s script doesn’t ignore, but never satisfyingly […]

Third installments have a history of letting us down — in the superhero world especially. You won’t find a lot of folks who list a movie with a “3” at the end as their favorite of a movie series, and frankly, they don’t have a lot to choose from either. It’s extremely tough to find […]

Back in 2002, Sony Pictures and filmmaker Sam Raimi brought one of Marvel Comics’ most popular superheroes, Spider-Man, to big screen for the first time. Peter Parker’s story captivated audiences and set the record for the most money made on an opening weekend. Now, let’s imagine none of that ever happened. Let’s pretend director Marc […]

It has finally been assembled. Marvel’s decision to make “The Avengers” might seem like the superhero equivalent of the ensemble movie “Valentine’s Day,” or the theory that stuffing multiple popular actors into one movie is an adequate substitute for storytelling and makes it so marketable that no one could pass it up. While that’s not […]

We’re now more than a decade into the modern superhero movie era, folks. At this point, we’ve just crossed the threshold of the “reboot phase,” in which studios have either been forced or decided to re-imagine some of the 2000‘s major superhero properties. We saw “X-Men: First Class” successfully relaunch the “X-Men” franchise last summer […]

Since the Golden Age of comic books, folks have been imagining what it would be like if ordinary people came across extraordinary power. But not until 2012 with “Chronicle” has anyone truly attempted to capture this notion with a sense of realism. Josh Trank and Max Landis have done just that with their low-budget found-footage […]

As far as superheroes go, they don’t get much campier than the “Star-Spangled Man.” A super soldier dressed in red, white and blue who bashes in Nazi skulls with his all-American shield? Undoubtedly, Captain America served a very specific purpose when he debuted in 1940, but 70 years later, Marvel Studio has found a way […]

The challenge of making a “Green Lantern” film was always going to be bringing it down to Earth. Not necessarily in a planetary sense, but sifting through and boiling down all the intergalactic mythology. Everything from the planet Oa to bird-fish aliens named Tomar-Re to a far-fetched concept of harnessing “will” to defend the universe […]