With this year’s Man of Steel and Iron Man 3 and upcoming entries from the Spider-Man, Avengers, Thor and Captain America franchises, we are living in what might as well be considered a golden age for superhero films. It’s amazing, really, considering how bad they used to be. There was a time when almost all superhero movies were unfailingly, hilariously, stupendously bad movies, but some were worse than others. And here are the five worst of all.
5. Spider-Man 3
It seemed unlikely that Sam Raimi’s third Spider-Man film could be any better than his second, but nobody expected it would be as bad as it was. The film’s central crisis is Peter Parker’s sudden affinity for dressing like a member of Fallout Boy.
4. Catwoman
This thing was bad enough to kill Halle Berry’s career, which was no mean feat in 2004.
3. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
This film took the Silver Surfer—one of the more compelling figures in Marvel’s history—and managed to make him so dull that this sequel utterly eclipsed how bad the first movie was.
2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
The movie looks like director Gavin Hood ripped a bunch of pages out of the scripts of all the wrong action movies. It’s a parade of comic book cameos doing boring things.
1. Batman and Robin
If you’ve seen it, you know. If you haven’t, just forget you ever even heard it existed.