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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2950 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What is your favorite superhero/capeshit movie?

None.

All of them I ever saw I regret seeing. The entire genre is trash unfit for human consumption.

At which point I probably have too high an opinion of human standards.

Into/Across Spiderverse. I reserve the right to throw this out if the third movie is atrocious, but unfortunately there's a real risk of that happening.

Similarly, X-Men First Class => X2 => Days of Future Past. The payoff for this one is immense and despite the changes they made to the story, it holds up thematically.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Pt1+2. Part 1 is shaky but again the payoff of Part 2 is worth it.

Sin City.

Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker.

Snowpiercer. One of my favorite movies of all time.

Into/Across Spiderverse. I reserve the right to throw this out if the third movie is atrocious, but unfortunately there's a real risk of that happening.

"Into the Spiderverse" would stand up okay on it's own, I think, even if the trilogy doesn't stick the landing, but I agree that it's only going to belong in a "favorites" list if all the checks they wrote in the first half of the sequel (I can't even call it the first sequel; not enough closure) don't bounce.

X-Men First Class => X2 => Days of Future Past. The payoff for this one is immense

That's an interesting watch order. Why leave out the first X-Men movie? I understand deciding that the benefit of "Days of Future Past is a little better if you watch X-Men 3 first" isn't worth the cost of "but you have to watch X-Men 3 first", but watching X-Men before X2 is win-win.

X1 just... isn't great. It's throughly average, a relic of its time and despite a handful of great moments doesn't really stand up on its own. There's not much that happens in it consequential to the throughline of that one arc aside from a great depiction of someone grappling with the reality of being a mutant for the first time and a bunch of Wolverine cliches.

The Shadow.

I'll nominate a few, because it's hard to choose one.

The Incredibles is a superhero movie and I think works particularly well because it's animated and has so many comedy elements. Unlike most modern superhero films, it doesn't take itself that seriously, and is a better film for it. Superheroes are, at their core, rather silly and childish, and embracing that works. It's the difference between The Incredibles and every Fantastic Four movie - the former isn't pretending to not be silly. Anyway, it is amazing. I am fond of Megamind for similar reasons, though it's a less polished and ultimately less successful film than The Incredibles. Still, when I watch a superhero film, it's because I want to have fun, and these films provide.

On the very other end of the spectrum, The Dark Knight is still amazing. Batman Begins is actually quite solid too. However, I don't think I'm going to nominate them as my favourite because they don't fit the genre. The Dark Knight is a dark, gritty crime drama that just happens to have Batman in it. It's not realistic - on the contrary, it's more of a psychodrama about nihilism and chaos - but it's not fundamentally about superheroes either.

I will also mention Iron Man (2008), which is probably the best film to star the character. It's from back when the MCU wasn't a thing, Robert Downey Jr. wasn't famous, and the character of Iron Man was still an obscure B- or C-lister that no one outside of comics fans recognised. If you knew Iron Man at all, it was probably in the context of him being a total asshole in Civil War (the comic). The film singlehandedly brought him into the public eye and made people love him again. Anyway, what I think the original Iron Man has going for it is that it's just un-self-conscious? It has none of the burdens of being a Marvel film. It's just a film. But it's a film that has such enthusiasm for its subject matter, and such infectious joy? The whole film is a love letter to engineering and creativity. Tony's first flight is a sequence of pure joy. It's also from back when the Iron Man armour was genuinely cool, and part of that for me is that the armour in the first film clanks and whirrs and sounds like a machine. It's not this nanomachine nonsense that may as well be magic, as it is in the latest films. It is metal and gears. Lastly, I want to say that unlike a lot of later MCU films, it has a bunch of really good shots in it? The Jericho test at the start or the tank scene have these really well-composed, memorable shots. But do you remember any similar shots from the sequels? Lastly, Black Sabbath. It's just great.

The Incredibles is a superhero movie and I think works particularly well because it's animated and has so many comedy elements. Unlike most modern superhero films, it doesn't take itself that seriously, and is a better film for it. Superheroes are, at their core, rather silly and childish, and embracing that works

Can't argue with that. Many superhero movies I've seen I didn't really care for. But with few allusions The Incredibles manage to conjure up a mythical retro mindspace where all that golden-to-silver age superheroes existed and enmeshes it with some great James Bond villain tropes. Also, a great movie.

I will nominate The Mask of Zorro as a runner-up for similar but not same reasons. (Cape, mask, heroics --- of course its capeshit, but it comes with swords, horses and 19th century California/Mexico landscapes, which makes it better). Not a perfect movie, but I had genuine fun watching it. Many darker movies are objectively notable (the Dark Knight trilogy, Watchmen, Joker) but not really fun.

I notice this with the MCU as well - the best films are the ones that embrace the transparently juvenile nature of the whole endeavour. As a rule, the more childish the film, the better it is.

Iron Man (2008) is basically a fourteen year old boy's fantasy. Tony Stark is rich, awesome, lives in a palace with a bunch of luxury cars, he has a private jet that transforms into a strip club with his own private pole-dancers, and so on. Stark's superpower is engineering, one of the most 'boy' careers around. He goes to all the fanciest parties and has sex with hot women. He makes cool toys and flies around and doesn't do what anyone else tells him. The film is a profoundly adolescent one, and even though the emotional arc of the character is growing up and becoming less of an utter man-child, he still does all the cool man-child stuff.

Likewise if you look at the other most successful MCU films. Guardians of the Galaxy is again a teenage boy's fantasy about being a cool guy. The Avengers is a Joss Whedon film and Whedon's greatest strength has been his inner teenager. The Avengers is about a clubhouse of four awesome dudes who hang out and quip wittily and do really cool stuff together. The most popular Thor film was Ragnarok, the one that dropped all the attempts to be serious or really evoke a heroic epic, and instead just went for adolescent comedy combined with awesome violence. Early on the MCU tried to give each character's cinematic sub-series a unique tone - Iron Man was all about technology and creativity, Captain America had these wistful, serious films about war and intrigue, and Thor was meant to be high fantasy with a Shakespearean edge from the comics, hence Kenneth Branagh. But that didn't take off that well with the superhero film audience, and while, say, this has no place in the serious quasi-Shakespearean fantasy epic, it is undoubtedly something that makes teenage boys cheer. The MCU always does better when it leans into the childishness.

I'd argue that the DC films' biggest problem was trying to take themselves too seriously. Charitably they were trying to differentiate themselves from Marvel, and they were probably chasing the successes of The Dark Knight and Watchmen, but... well, Watchmen was a deconstruction, and as I said, The Dark Knight isn't even really a superhero movie. When DC tried to do a serious, dark Superman it didn't work out. I've not seen Wonder Woman, but Aquaman was the best of the DC films I saw, and I do not think it was a coincidence that Aquaman was the most openly silly.

In fact, I'll go beyond just saying that superhero films do better when they embrace their own childishness. They do better when they realise that superheroes are kind of inherently comedic.

None of these films are straight comedies - not even Guardians of the Galaxy or Thor: Ragnarok. But they all have a lot of comedy elements. It works because, well, superhero comics are funny. They work much better if you embrace that.

That doesn't mean I want Superman or Captain America to gurn and mug at the camera. Superman and Cap are very sincere characters, whose simple goodness and wholesome patriotism are part of their appeal. But that doesn't mean you can't acknowledge the silliness or have comic scenes. The best Superman film is probably still Superman (1978), and it gets plenty of comedy mileage from the contrast between Superman and Clark.

Anyway, The Incredibles was a comedy, and I think that just being a straight comedy works better for superheroes than trying to cut the comedy entirely. Superheroes become miserable when they take themselves too seriously.

no one outside of comics fans recognised

Didn't he get a run in one of those 90's animated shows?

He did indeed. I and many of my generation knew who Iron Man was even if we weren't comic fans because of that.

Its plain that the MCU as such would not exist if not for Iron Man being as freaking cool as it was, and also allowing the heroes to coalesce around a central figure that wasn't Spiderman. And using him as the catalyst for bringing Spidey into the MCU proper was a natural choice and done well.

And thus, killing him in Endgame made such beautiful thematic sense, it really made it impossible to continue the MCU as a coherent world after that point. Why keep watching if there's no chance a smarmy RDJ might show up and one-liner his way into and out of trouble and reveal new suit designs in the process, with the classic rock blaring all the time. A top 5 fave favorite moment is his entrance in Avengers to confront Loki. The fact that Tony could burst onto the scene at any moment was a huge appeal.

And as you say, he would eventually wear out his welcome since there was nowhere else for the "iron man" concept to go after his magical nanobots mode.

Which was always going to be a problem. I think one of the best parts of Age of Ultron was the introduction of the Hulkbuster armor, showing that he puts a ton of thought into what designs he might need... but also showing this one as not quite up to the task it was built for and thus Stark isn't quite the walking 'counter everything' character that, say, Batman has a reputation as.

I dunno. Cap's my favorite of the main group, but Stark is what keeps me coming back.

I liked the most-recent The Batman. It’s not perfect, and given it’s the third or fourth iteration on film, its reputation undoubtedly suffers from fatigue. But it was an enjoyable, somewhat-smaller noir/detective story without an overpowered protagonist and any salvation by some fantastic tech, or a McGuffin or the like.

I generally liked it, but it was too long. Around the end of hour 3 the story has wrapped up. Then it keeps going for another half hour or so.

Also way too dark. I could barely see what was going on in parts.

Punisher War Zone. It is a masterpiece. Close second is The crow. The old one.

Spiderman 2 is great, came right before the big deluge of Mavel movies, and none of them really topped it.

Dredd. It doesn’t bother with origin story and does world-building fairly naturally through narrative. A tight 90 minutes with solid pacing and stays true to the feel of the source material.

YOU BETRAYED THE LAW

Ever since Chronicles of Riddick I have wanted Karl Urban to really break out a big success. I really wish Dredd had done that for him.

What business does a merc, a hellion and a slab addict have in the Riddermark? Speak quickly!

True, further proof of his acting and the costuming I never remember him playing Éomer. That just was Éomer.

Spider-Man (2002). It's a nostalgic movie for me because I saw it when I was a child, which is the appropriate age to watch superhero films.

Failing that, the borderline example of Unbreakable, which is still the best cinematic deconstruction of superheroes.

That spider man movie is iconic for me just for the upside down kiss scene, which I've tried to imitate with every gf I've ever had at every opportunity and it's a good trick that goes well every time. What other movie has that?

How did you arrange to be hanging upside-down at some point with each woman you've dated?

Picture this. It's 2011, you're nineteen or twenty. Your fraternity has booked a party bus to take everybody to formal. Everybody is pregamed, dancing in the aisle of the bus. You grab the overhead handrail, and realize you can do a pull up on it, then realize you can flip over and loop your legs over the rail and hang upside down. So of course you grab your girlfriend and you kiss her upside down and your fraternity brothers and their dates yell WHOOOOOO SPIDERMAN

So anytime you're drunk with your friends and you see a handrail or a pull up bar or an appropriately sized tree branch you can swing your legs over, you do the same thing. And everyone saw that movie ten years ago and cheers. It's the college equivalent of the middle school practice of jumping to touch the top of doorways.

Superman: The Movie. Lot of nostalgia there-- the night I went to see it, the era, everything.

Watchmen.

It kicked off a copycat trend of deconstructions of the genre, but unlike most of them, it was an actually good movie. Just don't watch the Director's Cut, the comic-book scenes add little or nothing to the story.

Just don't watch the Director's Cut, the comic-book scenes add little or nothing to the story.

I feel like there must be two versions of the director's cut or something, because I have the director's cut and there are no comic book scenes. It's just extra live action scenes (nothing super necessary but they are still enjoyable enough).

Great pick though, I love Watchmen. One of the very few movies I've seen which were good enough that I went to see them in the theater a second time.

There’s a directors cut then an extra special directors cut with the animated Tales of the Black Freighter sections added (this is the only version I watch, without the pirate stuff you’re losing the backstory and motivation of one of the most important characters).

Hard choice. The Dark Knight, Kick-Ass, and Mask of the Phantasm are all excellent in their own ways.

The Dark Knight. It’s not particularly close.

The problem with dark knight is that if you remove every scene heath ledger is not in it becomes even better movie.

Watching that film completely fresh, opening night, having ZERO clue as to how Ledger's performance would land, only knowing that he had died for it (in a certain sense) and then getting THAT FUCKING PERFORMANCE out of him was a transcendent experience.

Whenever Joker isn't on the screen, all the other characters should be asking, "where is the Joker?"

No. There are lots of good scenes where The Joker is mentioned or alluded to.

I was surprised there were so many other answers, I agree it's not close in my view either. The diversity of views here is a constant amazement to me.

I think you can probably guess.

Tell me... do you feel in charge?

I really liked Winter Solider and wished Marvel could have found more of that energy rather than just lean into being jokey Star Wars.

Kickass.

Does Mystery Men count?

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