No genre stirs up quite the same level of debate as superhero cinema, with fans happy to throw virtual hands if they stumble upon an opinion they don’t agree with, regardless of whether we’re talking about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DCEU, Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, or any of the other adaptations to flood the multiplex on a regular basis.
Different strokes for different folks is probably the simplest way to boil down the never-ending debate to its primal form, but that hasn’t stopped social media users from engaging in another heated discussion. Even though they don’t have much in common besides being four of the most widely-acclaimed superhero blockbusters of the last decade and change, a single tweet was all it took to open a significant can of worms.
Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is without a doubt one of the most influential studio films of the 21st Century, while Logan showed that gritty, grounded, and R-rated comic book stories can combine spectacle with pathos to deliver undoubted greats of the genre.
Meanwhile, Spider-Man: No Way Home conspired to bring unabashed fan service on the grandest stage imaginable to the masses, with Matt Reeves’ The Batman having increasingly split opinion among the DCEU fandom, although that’s to be expected when the only reason the project existed in the first place was the collapse of the SnyderVerse and Ben Affleck’s temporary retirement as the Caped Crusader.
In short, we’ll never get a consensus everyone agrees on, but trawling through the replies does at least indicate that passions are still high for all four, which can each be deemed phenomenal in their own unique way.
