Born from the pages of American comic books in the late 1930s, superheroes made the jump to the silver screen early and have never really left the cinema since. But over the past two decades, the popularity of superhero movies has risen to unprecedented heights. Between early 2000 and the end of 2020, Hollywood released no fewer than seventy-four films about the exploits of iconic figures such as Superman or Wonder Woman, super-teams such as the Fantastic Four or the X-Men, or lesser known characters such as Harley Quinn or Venom. Several of these movies count among the most profitable Hollywood productions of the last decades, with films such as The Dark Knight (2008), Iron Man 3 (2013), or Avengers: Endgame (2019) grossing more than a billion US Dollars during their respective theatrical runs alone (“All Time”). Considering such commercial successes, Dan Hassler-Forest has rightly identified “the superhero movie” as “the dominant genre in 21st-century Hollywood cinema” (Capitalist Superheroes 3). This dominance also expresses itself in the wealth of cultural activity that clusters around new releases. As privileged objects for the overlapping media publics of the early twenty-first century, superhero blockbusters garner the attention of interested observers who incessantly discuss, dismiss, or promote them. This conversation occurs not only offline, but also in online fan forums, in the mainstream press, and on news websites with a focus on popular culture, as well as in topical publications by professional critics. The discourse about superhero movies fills the gaps between releases with a constant coverage of production news, speculation about upcoming films, and the celebration or critical dissection of earlier ones. It also includes commentary and analyses that trace references to source materials or decipher deeper levels of meaning, fan fiction in various forms and guises, and scholarly treatises (such as this one) that seek to explain the genre's popularity. Beyond their status as cinematic entertainments, superhero movies thus are fulcra for an ongoing, multi-faceted discussion that creates a significant part of the genre's cultural visibility.

This book sets out to explain the current prominence of superhero blockbuster films by examining their interactions with the cultural environment that sustains them.