What is the best superhero movie?

Welcome to Pop Culture Throwdown, a weekly column where Mashable’s Entertainment team tackles the big questions in life, like who was the best Gilmore Girls boyfriend and what Star Wars movie is best.

This week, we asked each other (and all of you, on Twitter), what’s the best superhero movie? Let the throwdown begin.

Captain America: The First Avenger

As part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first phase, Captain America: The First Avenger is both unimaginably ambitious and beautifully self-contained. Because Steve Rogers grew up in a world without superheroes, there’s no mention of any other MCU bigwigs besides science and business magnate Howard Stark. The film has some of the MCU’s strongest villains with Red Skull (Hugo Weaving in objectively terrifying makeup) and actual Nazis, and one of its best female characters with Peggy Carter (who would go on to get her own TV show before Marvel even came close to a female superhero standalone). 

Steve and Peggy’s love not only wipes the floor with other MCU romance, but became one of the franchise’s central anchors and the emotional core of Avengers: Endgame. The fact that they didn’t get a happy ending or even the promise of tomorrow when Cap woke up 70 years in the future was not a feeling any of us are equipped to process. That’s pretty impressive for a skinny kid from Brooklyn. –Proma Khosla, Entertainment Reporter

 

The LEGO Batman Movie

It’s not a coincidence that two of the best superhero films ever made, Into The Spider-Verse and The LEGO Batman Movie, are animated. LEGO Batman may not have Into The Spider-Verse’s Oscar-winning acclaim, but it is a masterpiece unto itself. By default of their genre, animated superhero films like LEGO Batman have more freedom to creatively examine not only the hero in the film’s story, but also the legacy of the hero as he exists in the pop cultural conscience — something LEGO Batman does masterfully from the film’s opening frame. 

LEGO Batman examines the 21st century idea of Batman as a grimdark hero and, respectfully, throws it straight into the dumpster. Over the course of the movie, Will Arnett’s gravel-voiced Dark Knight is exposed as a needlessly dour, violent depressive whose refusal to connect with others stems from Batman’s greatest trauma. It leans on the inherent goofiness of Batman to pry the character away from the deadly serious place he’s come to occupy and reforges him into the compassionate, open-hearted, and occasionally silly hero Batman truly was all along. Also, no other superhero movie has Batgirl flying a plane into the Eye of Sauron and a choreographed LEGO dance sequence running over its credits. None. –Alexis Nedd, Senior Entertainment Reporter

The Incredibles

The best superhero films celebrate and criticize vigilantism in equal measure, an art Pixar perfected with The Incredibles. Exploring the golden age of supers through a critical (but not cynical) lens, the story of the Parr family examines what it means to be super without assigning inherent traits of good or evil to anyone involved. 

Yes, there’s a “winner” and a “loser” at the movie’s end. But being super is a choice that can be made by anyone — Syndrome, Mirage, Jack-Jack, Kari, Frozone, you! — and The Incredibles emphasizes the importance of our protagonists’ consistently making that choice throughout their battle. Of course, other superhero films have done the same (“With great power comes great responsibility,” blah, blah, blah), but The Incredibles embodies it so completely that you can hardly finish a viewing without asking, “Where’s my supersuit?” And if that isn’t a measure of complete and total excellence, I don’t know what is. -Alison Foreman, Entertainment Reporter

Batman Returns

In a genre not particularly known for sex, style, or a sense of humor, Batman Returns oozes all three. It’s gloriously unmoored from anything approaching “reality,” operating instead according to its own fairy tale logic, and its psychology goes beyond good versus evil, digging into the rage and loneliness of its larger-than-life main characters. Plenty of Batman films embrace the darkness of the character’s soul, the grittiness of the perpetually beleaguered Gotham City, but Batman Returns feels like the best kind of nightmare — one that disturbs and thrills in the moment, and then leaves you thinking about it for days afterward. -Angie Han, Deputy Entertainment Editor