JuicyTalk
Superhero fatigue apparently forgot to tell Spider-Man.
Less than a decade after Tom Holland’s solo franchise began with Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Brand New Day has become the highest-grossing movie ever at the domestic box office. That is an extraordinary endpoint for a series that launched in 2017 with Peter Parker still worrying about high school, homework, and whether Tony Stark thought he was ready to be an Avenger.
The last 10 years have been complicated for superhero movies. Some franchises arrived with enormous expectations and disappeared almost as quickly, while others grew into some of the highest-grossing superhero movies ever made. Marvel and DC have both rebooted major characters, Sony built several competing corners of the Spider-Man universe, and animation proved capable of pushing the genre somewhere live-action movies had never gone.
For this list, the franchise itself has to have launched within the last decade. That means Tom Holland’s Spider-Man qualifies through Homecoming in 2017, even though Holland first appeared as Peter Parker in Captain America: Civil War one year earlier. It also means Deadpool, whose first movie arrived in February 2016, just misses the cutoff.
These five stand out because they gave audiences more than one promising opening chapter. Some produced sequels that became even more ambitious, while others expanded beyond the movies themselves. Together, they represent some of the best superhero filmmaking of the past decade.
Tom Holland’s Spider-Man (2017)
Spider-Man: Homecoming gave Peter Parker something his previous live-action franchises largely skipped: the chance to spend significant time actually being a teenager. Holland had already made his MCU debut in Civil War, but his first solo movie established a version of Spider-Man whose biggest problems could involve an Avengers-level threat and a school dance in the same week.
The franchise kept expanding without losing Holland at its center. Far From Home pushed Peter outside New York, No Way Home turned decades of Spider-Man history into an emotional multiverse event, and Brand New Day brought the focus back toward Peter himself. Now that the fourth movie has broken the domestic box-office record, this is no longer merely a successful Spider-Man reboot. It has become one of the defining superhero franchises of its era.
Spider-Verse (2018)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse could have been dismissed as the animated alternative to Sony’s live-action Spider-Man movies. Instead, it introduced Miles Morales to movie audiences and immediately made almost every other superhero film look visually conservative.
The first movie won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, while Across the Spider-Verse pushed its animation even further by giving different universes their own visual languages. The franchise also demonstrated how to use the multiverse without turning alternate heroes into cameos for their own sake. Miles remains the emotional center no matter how many Spider-People appear around him, which is why anticipation for Beyond the Spider-Verse has lasted years rather than fading between installments.
Black Panther (2018)
Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther arrived inside the already enormous MCU but immediately established Wakanda as a franchise-worthy world of its own. Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa had debuted in Civil War, yet the 2018 movie gave audiences the culture, politics, technology, and conflicts that made Wakanda feel much larger than a superhero’s backdrop.
The sequel faced an almost impossible task after Boseman’s death. Rather than simply recasting T’Challa and moving forward, Wakanda Forever built its story around grief while introducing Namor and passing the Black Panther mantle to Shuri. The ending of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever also left the franchise with multiple directions to explore. Few superhero series have had to reinvent themselves so dramatically after only one movie and still emerged with their identity intact.
Matt Reeves’ The Batman Saga (2022)
One movie would normally make this a difficult franchise to defend. The Batman has something most one-film superhero properties do not: an eight-episode HBO series that proved Matt Reeves’ Gotham can sustain stories even when Batman barely enters the conversation.
Robert Pattinson’s debut leaned harder into detective noir than previous Batman movies, while The Penguin picked up shortly afterward and turned Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb into the center of a grim crime drama. The result makes this feel less like a single Batman movie waiting for a sequel and more like a fully functioning version of Gotham. Reeves built a world where villains, organized crime, and the city itself can carry stories without Bruce Wayne constantly standing in the middle of them.
Venom (2018)
Sony’s wider Spider-Man universe became an easy target after movies like Morbius and Madame Web, but Tom Hardy’s Venom accomplished something none of those films managed: audiences kept coming back.
The trilogy gradually realized that Eddie Brock and Venom were more entertaining as a dysfunctional partnership than as a conventional superhero pairing. Let There Be Carnage leaned further into that strange buddy-comedy energy before The Last Dance gave Hardy’s version of the character an ending after six years and three movies. The ending of Venom: The Last Dance may leave possibilities open, but simply completing a recognizable trilogy gives Venom an edge over plenty of superhero franchises that launched with much grander plans and never reached movie three.
- Release Date
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September 28, 2018
- Runtime
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112 minutes
- Director
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Ruben Fleischer
- Writers
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Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg, Kelly Marcel, David Michelinie, Todd McFarlane
- Producers
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Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, Amy Pascal
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Michelle Williams
Anne Weying
