Movies based on
Super Heroes or Comic Books

The superhero character has always played a part in the popular media of the time, in the early days many had their adventures on the radio. The Lone Ranger, Zorro, The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Shazam (Captain Marvel), Flash Gordon, The Green Hornet are just some of the characters that has been around for a long time and enjoyed 'life' in several media. Over the decades some of these characters ran in newspaper strips, radio, televison and cinema with varying degrees of popularity and success.

A few years after comic books made their way into the American culture superheroes made their way to the 'Big Screen' in the form of Saturday movie serial. It all begun with The Adventures of Captain Marvel in 1941 and in the years following The Phantom, Batman, Superman and Captain America all had their own features. Even with their limited budgets, primitive special effects, silly plotlines and dialogues these films were successful.

However in the decades that followed the changing face of the movie going public saw the decline and eventually the end of superheroes motion pictures. It was not until 1978's Superman that we saw the first modern day superhero movie and the start of the 'Silver Age' of Super Hero movies. The Superman franchise continued until Superman IV in 1987, this was followed by four Batman movies from 1989 to 1997 and in between there were two Swamp Thing and one Supergirl movie.

During this period one problem most superheroe movies had was replicating the super powers of the characters in a realistic fashion. This tended to be difficult and in some cases impossible or at least prohibitly expensive, however as we approached the end of the 2nd mellenia things begun to change. Advances in computer technology started taking continous and huge leaps and eventually reached the point where what ever you imagined could be reproduced with CGI. This opened the doors to producing ralistic superhero movies.

A couple of movies that first made use of the technology was Spawn in 1997 and Blade in 1998, however because of the nature of the main chracters in these movies only limited CGI was required. A couple of years later in 2000 the X-Men movie hit the cinema screen and benefited from additional advances in CGI technology.

By 2002 CGI technology had improved to such a level, that one of the big studios finally decided to take the plunge and produce a superhero movie, where the character's super power required huge amounts of CGI. Spider-Man had been a popular character for several decades and while some of his super powers are visually dramatic they had never been realistically re-produced in any live action form. Basically if you could have made realistic special effects for Spider-Man then you could do the same for almost any super hero. On May 3rd 2002 Spider-Man hit the cinemas across the United States and the 'Golden Age' of Super Heroes movies had arrived.

In this section of our website we will be listing all major comic book or super hero related movie released as a motion picture from 1990 to present. In time we may expand this time period to include movies from the 80's.

When you think of it much has changed in the last few years. Not too long ago there was a comic book/super hero movie every few years, now there are several every year, with no end in sight.