Stephen King has a major issue with superhero movies, and it’s very on brand

Stephen King and superheroes don’t mix. King’s incredible sense for horror, usually rooted in domestic familiarity and about how the supernatural affects the lives of regular folks, is at odds with a bombastic, surreal, and (generally) hopeful superhero genre.

Now, in comments to The Times UK about The Long Walk, the latest adaptation of one of his novels, King says he doesn’t like superhero movies for the way they sanitize violence:

“If you look at these superhero movies, you’ll see some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks but you never see any blood. And man, that’s wrong. It’s almost, like, pornographic…”

Stephen King calls superhero movie violence "almost pornographic," explaining: “If you look at these superhero movies, you’ll see some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks but you never see any blood. And man, that’s wrong."https://t.co/RNNXIR0nXP

— Variety (@Variety) September 5, 2025

King is nosing his way into a debate that’s been fiercely raging for years and is an issue that superhero movies have been trying to address. As much as Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was pilloried, it begins with a street-level viewpoint of Man of Steel‘s finale, showing the horror of skyscrapers collapsing as Superman and Zod duke it out in the skies above.

Bruce Wayne’s horror at being powerless to save his employees from the wreckage fuels the entire plot. And sure, the carnage isn’t bloody, but it’s on a distinctly human and believable level. Contrast that with the recent Superman (which I loved), in which Metropolis is literally torn in two as the film insists there’s been a full evacuation…

Why he loves Batman

King’s comments are perfectly in line with his past opinions. In 1986, he contributed the foreword to Batman #400, revealing that the Caped Crusader had been his favorite superhero since he was a child. King explained he loved Batman because he was “just a guy”, and he believed in his adventures:

“When Batman swung down into The Joker’s hideout on a rope or stopped the Penguin from dropping Robin into a bucket of boiling hog-fat with a well-thrown Batarang, I believed. These were not likely things, I freely grant you that, but they were possible things.”

Strict realism in worlds populated by alien gods, jet-powered apes, and time travel never made too much sense, but I can see where King is coming from. His work zeroes in on how people like you or I might react when faced with the unimaginable, so when he sees a city being destroyed, it makes sense he’d immediately wonder what a shower of falling shards of glass is going to do to the poor guy standing underneath it.