The Best Superhero Movie of Each Year of the 1990s

The most important superhero movie of the 1990s didn’t come out in the 1990s.

Tim Burton’s Batman was released on June 23, 1989. After a long and sometimes tortured development process, the film didn’t become a hit; it was a full-blown cultural phenomenon. It launched a massive cottage industry of Bat-merchandise, and inspired Hollywood to finally take notice of comic books as source material not just for kiddie cartoons and the occasional exploitation movie, but for big-budget blockbusters as well.

In the years that followed, studios tried to copy Batman’s success — at first by mostly aping its retro production design and costumes, but eventually by adapting various (lesser-known) comic and pulp heroes. They also tried to create their own superheroes, a tactic with a very spotty track record then and now.

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By the end of the decade that original Burton Batman franchise had sputtered out in hailstorm of neon paint and bad ice puns. (You heard me, a hailstorm of bad ice puns! If Schwarzenegger can do it, so can I.) But that was also the moment that Hollywood started to bring Marvel into the mainstream with films like Blade. As the ’90s turned to the 2000s, the first X-Men movie was only a few months away. Superhero films were never the same.

In other words, the ’90s were a pretty important and interesting time in the history of superhero cinema. The list below charts that period, picking just one best superhero movie from each of the decade’s ten years. That wasn’t always easy — again, the ’90s were a very up and down period for superheroes. But as I have learned from watching a lifetime of superhero movies, when something is difficult that’s when a hero rises to the occasion.