Warner Bros.
Audiences are spoiled with superhero movies today.
Between this year and last, we've been treated to six movies within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not to mention everything else in between. Whether it be DC and Warner Bros.' answer to the MCU in the divisive DC Extended Universe, or Fox's "X-Men" franchise, superhero fans - for better or worse - have no shortage of movies to consume.
It was a different landscape 10 years ago.
In 2008, superhero movies were still popular, but they were at a dramatically different place tonally and culturally. "Cinematic universes" weren't the talk of Tinseltown. In fact, the MCU had only just begun with "Iron Man" and the less impressive "The Incredible Hulk" later that summer. And "The Dark Knight" was a blockbuster phenomenon.
Looking back at that year today, it's apparent that it was a turning point for the superhero genre. "The Dark Knight," widely regarded as the best film in the genre but also regularly recognized as more of a crime thriller that happens to star a comic-book character, inspired countless less-successful copycats. Characters like Spider-Man and Superman would get the "dark and gritty and grounded" treatment in an effort to replicate the success of "The Dark Knight."
But "The Dark Knight," in hindsight, seems like an outlier. It's hard to imagine the movie working by today's superhero movie standards, which is why the movies it inspired were destined for failure. That's thanks to the MCU, which was laying the groundwork for what the superhero genre - and much of the rest of Hollywood - would become at a time when studios thought "The Dark Knight" was the way of the future.
With that in mind, the genre has faced a sort of "whiplash" effect throughout the last 10 years, and below I'll go through the evolution of the genre over that course of time - from the failure of "The Amazing Spider-Man" movies to the ascension of the MCU, and why no other studio can seem to replicate it.
Below is the evolution of the superhero genre since 2008, the notable movies that helped shape it during the last 10 years, and what the future may hold: