The Worst Superhero Films Ever Made

The premise seems slapped together from reading a couple of Wikipedia entries about superheroes, a lazy excuse for lazier gags, carried only by the natural appeal of Spencer and McCarthy.

Superman III (1983)

Christopher Reeve’s Superman may be the all-time greatest performance in any superhero movie, a miracle of posture and presence that makes you believe that Clark Kent and Superman are two separate people. Richard Pryor may be the funniest person who ever lived, a boundary-pushing comic who never forgot basic joke structure.

And yet Superman III wastes them both, a lowest common denominator romp that holds its subjects and audience in contempt. The robot transformation scene may have disturbed some kids at the time, but nothing else in this dismal third feature is worth remembering.

Superhero Movie (2008)

Superhero Movie tells you precisely what to expect from this film from Craig Mazin of The Specials, not just because it’s a movie about superheroes. Rather, the title Superhero Movie signals the amount of creativity in the film: absolutely none.

Former Nickelodeon star Drake Bell plays Rick Riker, who becomes the powerful Dragonfly through a series of events taken from Spider-Man, X-Men, and Batman Begins. Bell and his co-stars are likable enough, and there’s a more coherent plot than most spoof movies of the era, but Superhero Movie succeeds neither as a comedy nor as a superhero movie, despite what its title says.

Barb Wire (1996)

Since her introduction in 1993, Barb Wire has appeared in a handful of comics, never really catching on with readers. But her simple backstory (tough night club owner) and distinctive look (attractive woman in strips of leather) worked for model-turned-actress Pamela Anderson, who needed a vehicle.

Anderson does about as well as you’d expect, but the B-movie greats Temuera Morrison, Xander Berkley, and Udo Kier handily pick up the slack. Even stranger, director David Hogan and screenwriters Chuck Pfarrer and Ilene Chaiken use Casablanca as a template for their story resulting in a movie that isn’t good, but is… interesting?

Morbius (2022)

The opening to this article argued that modern superhero flops aren’t that bad in the grand scheme of things. Morbius is the exception that proves that rule. An utterly inessential movie, Morbius came to life not because anyone had a great story to tell about B-list Spider-Man villain Morbius the Living Vampire, but because Sony had the character’s film rights and superhero movies make money.

Lazily following beats from superhero films from the 2000s, namely Batman Begins, Morbius stars a listless Jared Leto as a scientist who gains vampire powers after injecting himself with bat blood, a crazy premise that the movie never acknowledges. At least Matt Smith is on hand to be bonkers as the movie’s villains, providing rare and welcome moments of entertainment.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

Every comic book fan will tell you that Wolverine is a short, hairy Canadian with a bad attitude. So it’s a testament to Hugh Jackman’s charisma and commitment to the part that even the most fussy comics reader has come to accept the tall, handsome actor as a quality Wolverine. So it’s no small thing to see that Jackman lazily plods around his first solo outing in his signature role.

Even if one ignores the tendency of X-Men Origins: Wolverine to introduce new characters instead of telling a story, Jackman barely engages with his character, making Logan feel as weightless and fake as the CGI claws he unleashes.

Son of the Mask (2005)

In the early 1990s, producers took a violent independent comic called The Mask and turned it into a vehicle for Jim Carrey to play a living cartoon. The belated sequel Son of the Mask strays even further from the source material and further from the quality of the original by replacing Carrey with the far less talented Jamie Kennedy.

Son of the Mask gets a little slack for being more of a kid’s movie than the original, but that’s not enough to forgive the unending sugar-induced headache that is this obnoxious and joyless film.

Suicide Squad (2016)

Few people who enjoy Suicide Squad actually cite the movie that hit theaters. Even the biggest supporter admits that the movie we currently have is a flashy, unfunny mess, filled with obvious pop songs and narrative culs-de-sac, the result of studio Warner Bros. taking the film from director David Ayer and giving a movie trailer company final edit. Those fans insist a never-before-seen “Ayer Cut” preserves the original intention of the movie, a dark team film about bad guys such as Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Will Smith’s Deadshot.

That may be true; The Ayer Cut may be a good movie. But since no one has seen the Ayer Cut, we have to judge Suicide Squad for what it is, one of the worst superhero movies ever made.

Polar (2019)

Based on a little-known indie comic about a super assassin fighting his way toward retirement, the Netflix film Polar features a remarkable Mads Mikkelsen performance as the aging killer, the Black Kaiser. Mikkelsen plays both the full weight of a man who has spent his life doing evil for money, only to have that money taken from him.

So why include Polar so low on this list? Because surrounding Mikkelsen is a trite and crass comedy with loud scenes indulging in flashy violence and offensive jokes. Every scene exists only to impress the viewer with its irreverent humor, constantly failing to be funny, impressive, or even shocking.

Spawn (1997)

When Spawn debuted in 1992, he signaled a new era of comics in which people like artist Todd McFarlane had complete control over their creations, not subject to the whims of companies like Marvel and DC. While Spawn’s first publisher, Image, has become a home to interesting, creator-owned stories, it tended to publish a juvenile mishmash of concepts done better in other books, all of which is on display in the 1997 film Spawn.

Despite a committed performance by the furious Michael Jai White in the lead, Spawn relies on unnecessarily complicated lore and John Leguizamo at his most annoying as the villain Clown. By the time the movie climaxes, Spawn effectively argued for editorial control and against the individual vision.

Sheena (1984)

The product of early comics of the 1930s, Sheena carried with it some retrograde views about Africa and its relationship to Europe. Screenwriters Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Newman seem aware of those problems, but instead of working to give their African characters depth, they make Sheena an environmental hero, fighting to save her fictional country Tigora from Indigenous peoples.

Even worse, star Tanya Roberts can’t carry the movie, as demonstrated by every wooden delivery she gives. Sheena does feature amazing nature photography shot on location in Kenya, but the imagery hardly justifies the terrible movie surrounding it.

The Spirit (2008)

Artist and writer Will Eisner is one of comics’ first innovators, a storytelling genius who used the central conceit of a masked hero called the Spirit to tell inventive tales with human compassion. Decades later, artist and writer Frank Miller drew from samurai movies and hard-boiled fiction to give superhero comics a blast of energy, bringing moral complexity to Batman and Daredevil.

But in his sole directorial effort, The Spirit, Miller forgets forgoes all creativity for a dense, visually nauseating mess. Using the CG techniques used during the film adaptation of his comic Sin City, Miller constructs fake-looking worlds in which the Spirit (Gabriel Macht) battles the supercriminal, the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson).

Catwoman (2004)

Never mind that Catwoman abandons the well-established story from the comics. Never mind that Catwoman ignores Michelle Pfeiffer’s scene-stealing turn in Batman Begins. Never mind that Catwoman dresses Halle Berry in the most ridiculous outfit in superhero history.

Catwoman fails solely because of the terrible direction from French visual effects supervisor Pitof. Instead of using his camera to tell a story, even one as simple as Catwoman, Pitof sweeps around characters and frantically cuts from one sequence to another, with no sense of visual coherence. Instead of giving the movie kinetic energy, these choices render the movie unwatchable, killing whatever small chance of success Catwoman may have had.