A Reel Opinion: The Top 10 Worst Superhero Films

Earlier this week, the trailer for the Sony Pictures-produced supervillain film VENOM: THERE WILL BE CARNAGE was released. It is a sequel to the solo film VENOM from 2018; a superhero film without a superhero that has been, and still does draw debate today. Some consider VENOM to be great, others (like this Blogger), ranks it up there with the worst. And that leads us to Reel Speak’s Top 10 Worst Superhero Films. 

 

With so many caped crusaders hitting the screen in the last 20 years, there have been some great successes...and some miserable failures; GREEN LANTERN (2011), JONAH HEX (2010), and WW84 (2020), for starters. But superhero films can be given a wide berth. Many fail hard in places like story and character, but deliver on action…which gives them a slight pass. The films based on the DC Comics heroes have been all over the place in the last decade, with Zack Snyder’s MAN OF STEEL (2013), and BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (2016), full of terrible moments but also some very good ones. The continuing JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017) debacle is an embarrassment of riches for all involved, but it did manage to do a few things better than the four-hour re-cut released this year. The absolute worst superhero films are the ones that have nothing to save them; no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Another important factor to consider are the films that did not live up to the sum of its parts, which means low-budget, B-movie junk like the Shaquille O’Neal-led STEEL (1997) barely counts as a real movie. 

 

 

So let’s tug on some capes…

 

 

 

10. CAPTAIN AMERICA (1990)

There is an argument that we shouldn’t be too hard on superhero films made before the modern era, as back then no one really knew how to do it right. That’s a lot of bull, because the magnificent SUPERMAN from 1978 and the beloved BATMAN from 1989 say otherwise. But even if we were to lower our standards, this very first version of the Star-Spangled man in a feature suffered from cheap-looking rubber suits (complete with rubber ears), and a lead actor who played the heroic Steve Rogers as a lumbering dumbass. 

9. VENOM (2018)

One of the worst trends in cinema right now are the superhero movies without superheroes; instead spending time with the bad guys as they spin their wheels in the mud. This Sony Pictures-produced laugher based on the popular Spider-Man villain couldn’t decide if it wanted to be an odd-couple comedy or horror, so it tries to be both and ends up with a bizarre soup sandwich. 

8. CATWOMAN (2004)

Oscar winner Halle Berry stars in this joke which didn’t even bother to use the character’s name from its comic origins. Based on the long-running and iconic supervillain in the Batman comics, CATWOMAN had some ridiculous set-pieces, even for a comic book film, and its lack of any real story or character and focus on Berry’s slinky, half-naked body raises an eyebrow. 

7. SUPERGIRL (1984)

Helen Slater dons the skirt of Supergirl in this spin-off of the SUPERMAN series starring the late great Christopher Reeve. Similar to CATWOMAN, SUPERGIRL lacks anything resembling a story and just wants to make a movie about Slater’s legs. Some may give this a pass as a low-budget affair, but the talent involved; Slater, Faye Dunaway, Mia Farrow, and Peter O’Toole suggests that it could have been better. 

6. SPIDER-MAN 3 (2007)

By the time Sam Raimi made it to his third Spider-Man film, the bar was set high. His SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004) was excellent, and took a page out of the EMPIRE STRIKES BACK playbook in leaving important story threads out there for resolution. Sony Pictures drove Raimi mad in demanding one-too-many villains be present, leading to a very unbalanced movie. Raimi wasn’t without his own mistakes; filming some pretty dumb sequences and resolving those hanging threads by way of awkward information dumps. 

5. X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (2009)

Starting in 2000, the X-MEN series launched strong, took a nose-dive, recovered, bombed again, recovered, and then fizzled out for good. There’s a lot to pick on in this series, including THE LAST STAND (2006), APOCALYPSE (2016), and DARK PHOENIX (2019)…but none of those reached the level of disappointment than this first solo outing of the beloved clawed, self-healing mutant. Hugh Jackman gives it his all, but even he can’t overcome the clunky plot and shitty CGI that made his claws look like a Roger Rabbit cartoon.

4. BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997)

The fourth and final film in Warner Bros.’ initial BATMAN series, which started in 1989 with Tim Burton’s still-popular and admired BATMAN. This Joel Schumacher-directed, big-budget, packed-with-stars yukfest had to overcome a newly recast Bruce Wayne (George Clooney), who was overshadowed by the presence of mega-star Arnold Schwarzenegger. Stuffed with terrible jokes and headache-inducing colors, the film wasted its talent (Clooney, Schwarzenegger, Chris O’Donnell, Uma Thurman, Alicia Silverstone), and killed the Bat on film for nearly a decade. 

3. FANTASTIC FOUR (2015)

This Fox Studios-produced adaptation of the iconic Marvel team of heroes was doomed from the start. The cast was boring (Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell), and director Josh Trank was a train wreck…acting like a weirdo on-set which messed up the entire film. On the screen, the film was dull, an editing disaster, and seems to be missing whole sections. In the high-bar era of superhero movies, it’s mind-boggling that something feeling this incomplete would actually be released. 

2. SUICIDE SQUAD (2016)

Similar to the X-MEN series, there is a lot to pick on in Warner Bros.’ adaptations of DC Comics heroes; including the Zack Snyder films, and Patty Jenkins’ bizarre WONDER WOMAN sequel released this year. But even they look like masterpieces compared to this wacky thing which made no sense from concept to execution. Once again featuring Batman baddies with no Bat, SUICIDE SQUAD was completely dysfunctional; odd casting, non-sensical plotting, an editing mess, and stakes that no one could care about. So bad that Warner Bros. themselves decided to reboot the thing and start all over. Embarrassing. 

1. SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)

The late great Christopher Reeve set a high bar for his own series and for superhero films over the next 40 years after SUPERMAN (1978), and its sequel in 1980. The third installment in 1983 took a dive in quality, but even that looks good compared to the fourth and final film in this initial Superman run. The concept of Superman eradicating nuclear weapons in the world could be looked at as un-necessarily political, but arguably feels like something Supes would do in his life-long goal of peace on Earth. Execution-wise, everything fell apart. Suffering hard from a very limited budget, the film looked cheap and on the level of a B-movie, and the big bad villain Nuclear Man looks and sounds terrible. The stories say that parent studio Cannon Films ran out of money during production and basically released an unfinished film, and it shows. There’s nothing worth saving here. 

REEL SPEAK'S TOP 10 WORST SUPERHERO FILMS

1. SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE
2. SUICIDE SQUAD
3. FANTASTIC FOUR
4. BATMAN AND ROBIN
5. X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE
6. SPIDER-MAN 3
7. SUPERGIRL
8. CATWOMAN
9. VENOM
10. CAPTAIN AMERICA