Why So Many Early 2000s Superhero Movies Failed

After Spider-Man broke box office records in 2002, Hollywood knew audiences wanted superheroes, but nobody had figured out a consistent formula that worked yet, and that might ultimately be why so many early 2000s superhero movies failed. What followed was a stretch of studios chasing that success in completely different directions, at times removing the exact things audiences wanted to see from these characters, with no one person holding any of it together.

The results were surprisingly rough. Daredevil lasted one movie, while its spinoff Elektra bombed. Hulk had a massive second week decline at the box office before being rebooted five years later. Catwoman bombed, Punisher bombed, and Superman Returns failed to properly relaunch the franchise. Basically, what looked like Hollywood's next sure thing had turned into a string of false starts. So if audiences clearly wanted superhero movies, why did so many of them struggle? Later in this piece I'll also get into why James Gunn's approach at DC might be an attempt to fix the problem from both ends.

Blade proved a Marvel hero could carry a movie without calling itself a comic book movie

While trapped in the void, Deadpool and Wolverine meet a handful of superheroes from the early 2000s, including Wesley Snipes' Blade, Jennifer Garner's Elektra, and Chris Evans' Johnny Storm. Today, these characters feel like "remnants of a forgotten era of superhero movies" before cinematic universes, and before Marvel had created a consistent formula for what these movies were supposed to be. At the time, Hollywood was still figuring it out. In fact, Marvel's first box office hit didn't even market itself as a comic book movie at all.

When Blade came out in 1999, Marvel had spent years struggling to get its characters onto the big screen. Howard the Duck had been a disaster, Captain America had skipped theaters in the United States, and an entire Fantastic Four movie had been produced without ever officially being released. Blade changed all that, becoming a surprise hit and proving that a Marvel character could actually carry a successful movie, even if its connection to comic books was barely acknowledged.

If you go back to Blade, that makes sense, because it doesn't really feel like what we would now consider a superhero movie. It's an R rated vampire action movie filled with techno music, martial arts, black leather, and an incredibly specific late '90s gothic future aesthetic. Even one of the film's producers described it as a genre bender that audiences couldn't quite categorize as horror, superhero, vampire, or martial arts. But the film worked. Then X-Men worked. And when Spider-Man became one of the biggest movies in the world in 2002, Hollywood suddenly had proof that there was an enormous audience for comic book movies.

Hollywood didn't know which parts of Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man actually worked

The problem was that nobody in Hollywood really knew which parts of those movies were responsible for their success. Was it simply that audiences wanted superheroes? Was it the darker tone of Blade and X-Men? The sincerity and bright comic book aesthetic of Spider-Man? Or was it something else entirely?

Because there was no proven formula yet, the movies that followed went in completely different directions. Hulk was a dark psychological drama about repressed childhood trauma, while Fantastic Four went the other way and became a broad family comedy. Daredevil went incredibly dark, was shot mostly at night, and leaned heavily into black leather, exaggerated martial arts and wire work, and nu metal. Superman Returns tried to recreate the tone and nostalgia of the late '70s and early '80s Christopher Reeve films. None of these movies really felt like they belonged to the same genre, because at the time, nobody had decided what that genre was supposed to look like.

Fantastic Four, Hulk and Superman Returns missed what audiences wanted from those characters

The problem with all of these different approaches is that some of them simply didn't give audiences what they actually wanted from these characters. Fantastic Four leaned so heavily into broad comedy and a friendly family tone that the movie felt aimed at kids, alienating older audiences.

Hulk had almost the opposite problem. Ang Lee's interest in Bruce Banner's repressed childhood trauma and complicated relationship with his father alienated younger audiences. The movie felt less like a conventional superhero movie, with much of it consisting of Hulk being chased by the military, while Lee experimented visually with split screens and comic book panels.

Superman Returns had a different problem. Bryan Singer was so determined to pay tribute to the Richard Donner movies that the film sometimes felt like it belonged to a bygone era, with many fans criticizing it for its lack of action and energy. So Hollywood was learning an important lesson: simply putting a recognizable superhero on screen wasn't enough. Audiences had expectations for these characters, and if the movie strayed too far from them, the name alone wasn't necessarily going to carry the franchise.

After Batman and Robin, studios were embarrassed to stick close to the comics

There was also another problem. After Batman and Robin failed, Hollywood was embarrassed about sticking too close to the comics, and that attitude showed up all over these movies, even the successful ones. X-Men might have helped prove that superhero movies could work, but it also went out of its way to make the characters look less like superheroes. Instead of the bright blue and yellow costumes from the comics, the X-Men wear matching black leather inspired by the Matrix. Sam Raimi gave Spider-Man organic web shooters instead of the mechanical ones Peter builds in the comics, because Raimi thought it was too unrealistic for a teenager to build them.

Catwoman didn't even use Selina Kyle, instead creating an entirely new character named Patience Phillips, who was given supernatural cat powers the comic book character never had. Constantine took a blonde British occult detective, cast Keanu Reeves, and moved him to Los Angeles. Fantastic Four turned Doctor Doom from the ruler of Latveria and one of Marvel's most powerful villains into a businessman who gets his powers in the same accident as the Fantastic Four. And when Galactus finally appeared in the sequel, rather than depicting the enormous purple armored character from the comics, the movie turned him into a giant cloud.

The Punisher moved Frank Castle from grimy New York to the sunny beaches of Tampa, Florida, and changed his family's death from a random mob killing into a deliberate hit ordered against them. And probably the most ridiculous example is sewing Deadpool's mouth shut in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and turning him into a silent villain with laser eyes and retractable swords coming out of his arms.

That's what makes a lot of these adaptations so strange in hindsight. Studios wanted the recognizable names and built in audiences that came with comic books, but they weren't always convinced that the things that made those characters popular would actually work on screen. So costumes were toned down, origins were rewritten, personalities were changed, and some of the more ridiculous comic book elements were removed entirely. Sometimes these changes actually helped make the movies accessible to wider audiences, but other times Hollywood was taking a comic book character and removing the exact things audiences wanted to see.

Marvel's heroes were split across Sony, Fox, Universal and New Line with no one in charge

Part of the reason a lot of these movies felt so different is that, unlike today, there wasn't one person like Kevin Feige at Marvel or James Gunn at DC overseeing them all. Throughout the '90s, Marvel had licensed the film rights to many of its biggest characters to different studios. Sony had Spider-Man, Fox had X-Men, Daredevil, and Fantastic Four, Universal had Hulk, and New Line had Blade.

So even though all these characters came from Marvel Comics, the movies themselves were being developed by completely different companies with different executives, producers, directors, and ideas about what they should be. Sony wasn't thinking about how Spider-Man should fit alongside X-Men, and Fox didn't need Fantastic Four to resemble Daredevil, even though it owned both of them. New Line could make Blade into an R rated vampire movie, while Universal handed Hulk to Ang Lee to make a psychological drama.

Each studio was simply trying to make the best version of the property it controlled, and if that meant completely different tones, styles, and approaches, there was nothing stopping them. Sometimes the results were great, like Blade and Spider-Man, and other times you got Catwoman and its infamous basketball scene. The quality and tone could swing wildly from one movie to the next because there was no larger creative system or person holding any of it together.

These weren't early MCU movies, and Kevin Feige couldn't stop Galactus becoming a cloud

This is an important distinction between these movies and the MCU that came later. Looking back, it's easier to think of these movies as an early generation of Marvel movies, but they really weren't. They were a collection of unrelated adaptations made by different studios that happened to be based on characters from the same comic book company.

Marvel Studios eventually changed that by bringing production under one roof and putting Kevin Feige in charge of overseeing the larger direction of the films. Suddenly, there was one person thinking about casting, tone, continuity, and how each movie fit into everything around it. Directors could still bring their own ideas, but they were working inside a much more clearly defined system, the Marvel machine. In the early 2000s, that system simply didn't exist, and without it, there was nothing connecting these movies beyond the Marvel logo appearing somewhere in the credits.

While Feige was often a consultant on these films, he wasn't in charge of them. He couldn't stop Fox from turning Galactus into a cloud or sewing Deadpool's mouth shut, and he couldn't stop Avi Arad from cramming Venom into Spider-Man 3. He was one voice among many, rather than the person sitting above the entire operation.

Shared universes need compatible tones, which is why Matt Reeves' Batman sits apart from Gunn's DCU

Because none of these early movies were supposed to exist in the same universe, there was really no reason for them to match tonally either. Blade could be an R rated vampire movie, Fantastic Four could be a family comedy, and Hulk could be a psychological drama, because none of these characters were ever expected to walk into the same room. Once Marvel began building the MCU, that changed. Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America could still feel different from one another, but they also had to feel compatible enough that when the Avengers eventually brought them together, you could believe they had been living in the same universe the entire time.

You can see a version of that problem playing out at DC right now. James Gunn's Superman exists in a bright, colorful world filled with aliens, monsters, and talking robots, while Matt Reeves' Batman is an incredibly grounded crime drama that feels even more grounded than Nolan's films. These versions of Superman and Batman would feel incredibly strange sharing the same world, which is exactly why Reeves' Batman has been kept separate under the DC Elseworlds label instead of being folded into Gunn's DCU. As a result, DC can allow Reeves to continue making his grounded Batman movies without having to explain how that same Gotham exists alongside Krypto and giant monsters.

The danger of the Marvel approach, though, is that consistency can eventually become creatively restrictive. Once every movie has to fit into a larger machine, filmmakers have less freedom to make something that feels completely unlike everything around it, and many of them have found that out the hard way, often clashing with Feige. Something like Blade, which is incredibly stylized and violent, would never be made by Marvel today, which is a real shame.

James Gunn seems to be looking for a middle ground at DC

Gunn seems to be trying to solve this problem over at DC. Rather than giving the DCU one consistent house style, he said that individual filmmakers should bring their own sensibilities to each project. Superman can be a family friendly superhero movie, Lanterns can be a grounded crime drama in the vein of True Detective, and Clayface can be an R rated body horror film, while technically existing in the same universe.

Gunn has said a huge part of the fun of reading DC Comics when he was young was enjoying a variety of stories in various genres, and seeing inventive ways those tones interacted and interwove. He's essentially pointing out that DC Comics has always allowed completely different genres and tones to exist alongside one another. So, in a strange way, DC is now trying to find a middle ground between the two extremes. The early 2000s gave filmmakers almost complete freedom but very little consistency, while Marvel eventually created an incredibly consistent machine, sometimes at the expense of filmmakers' individuality. Gunn's experiment is whether you can have both.

Consistency is better in a lot of ways, but filmmakers need room for big swings

That might ultimately be why so many early 2000s superhero movies failed. Hollywood knew audiences wanted superheroes, but nobody had figured out a consistent formula that worked yet. And while in a lot of ways the consistency we have now is obviously better, we may have lost something along the way, because "filmmakers need to be allowed to take big swings sometimes."

Ang Lee's Hulk might not have worked for everyone, but at least it was trying to do something completely different. By contrast, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man had a style and attitude that still feels unique almost 30 years later. When those swings connect, you end up with something incredible. Of course, the flip side is that sometimes they miss badly. So maybe the real question isn't whether superhero movies are better with a formula or without one, but how much consistency you're willing to trade for the possibility of getting something genuinely unique and incredible that transcends the genre.

Which early 2000s superhero movie do you think took the most interesting swing?