Every Superhero Movie On IMDb's 100 Lowest-Rated Movies List

Long before Marvel Studios started struggling with its Marvel Cinematic Universe (which might be better left to die at this point) there were some historic superhero movie missteps. The first real superhero blockbuster, 1978's "Superman" remains one of the greatest comic book movies of all time, but even that birthed some seriously questionable sequels, thereby setting a precedent for the best and worst superhero films to come.

In the years since Christopher Reeve's Supes convinced audiences of the late-70s that a man could fly, we have had some downright abject superhero outings. When done right, these films can offer the ultimate escapist fantasy, tapping into our collective inner child and taking us on rapturous thrill-rides through our own imaginations. Or, they can be "Black Adam." I kid ... sort of. The problem exemplified by that notoriously underwhelming DC effort is that these films can often just be lazy, formulaic, CGI-laden slogs. But even before the rise of digital effects, there were plenty of absolute superhero stinkers. In fact, IMDb's list of the lowest-rated films of all time includes six superhero movies and not one of them belongs to the modern green screen nightmare-scape.

With so-called superhero fatigue well and truly setting in, there's never been a better time to look back at these comic book duds and take stock of what exactly went wrong. With that in mind, here are all the superhero movies on IMDb's lowest-rated movie list.

Though she's yet to front a movie worthy of her name, Catwoman has had a fairly good history on page and screen. Michelle Pfeiffer's depiction of the beloved Batman antihero remains indelible in the minds of those who grew up with the Burton films, and Zoë Kravitz did the character proud in Matt Reeves' "The Batman." But the one Halle Berry-starring solo Catwoman outing lamentably remains a stain on that otherwise remarkably pristine record.

The failure of 2004's "Catwoman" is well-documented at this point, to the extent that it's hardly worth parsing exactly what's wrong with this infamous fiasco of a film. Needless to say, nobody really liked "Catwoman" which currently bears a shameful 8% on Rotten Tomatoes and sits at number 47 in the IMDb lowest-rated rankings. A 3.4 rating based on 129,000 votes isn't quite as bad as you might expect for this film, but it certainly ain't great — though "Catwoman" is the highest-rated of all the lowest-rated superhero movies here, so that's something ... I guess.

One bright spot in the whole "Catwoman" debacle is that Halle Berry actually accepted her Razzie award then set it on fire, showing up at the 2005 ceremony to thank Warner Bros. for "casting [her] in this piece of s**t" before announcing to the audience,"My mother told me that if you couldn't be a good loser then there's no way you could be a good winner." Sadly, there's nothing good about "Catwoman" even though it is the highest on this wretched list.

1997 wasn't a great year for superhero movies. The same year "Batman & Robin" almost killed the comic book movie outright (more on that later), Shaquille O'Neal starred in an equally abysmal superhero outing that is in the odd position of being both a small enough project that it escaped unending infamy and a big enough blunder that it remains one of the worst superhero movies of all time.

Casting Shaq might have been the first step towards "Steel" becoming a box office flop. The 7-foot 1-inch NBA star played former Army scientist and weapons designer John Henry Irons, who after being paralyzed in a work accident, dons a steel suit that was cheap enough to betray its unfortunate rubber construction when viewed on the big screen. Shaq was by no means an actor when he agreed to star in "Steel," either, having only fronted two movies prior, neither of which made much money or resulted in any critical praise. 

Written and directed by Kenneth Johnson, who was more known for his work on TV shows like "The Bionic Woman" and "The Incredible Hulk," "Steel" saw Shaq's hero face off against Judd Nelson's disgraced soldier Nathaniel Burke in a feature that was confusingly described by the San Francisco Chronicle as a "tolerable stinker of a film." This cheesy, low-budget superhero effort, with some truly terrible performances, made just $1.68 million at the global box office on an already meager budget of $16 million. As such, its standing at number 52 on the IMDB lowest-rated list, with a 3.0 rating based on 15,000 votes, is probably even a bit better than it deserves.

A year after Tim Burton's "Batman" redefined the comic book movie forever, Marvel decided it was going to have a go and churned out "Captain America," a $3-million project that was initially supposed to cost $40 million but which hit some major financial issues during production and saw its theatrical ambitions quashed. The Albert Pyun-directed feature has since become a hilarious footnote in Marvel's on-screen history, if it's even remembered at all. By all accounts, then, the forgotten '90s "Captain America" was a disaster ... or was it?

Well, yes. This is a film that involves a plot wherein Red Skull (Scott Paulin) is actually responsible for the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Otherwise, there's quite a bit in "Captain America" that's similar to the far superior Marvel Studios effort "Captain America: The First Avenger," at least in terms of Steve Rogers (Matt Salinger) bulking up after a dose of Super Soldier Serum and becoming the titular hero during World War II. Otherwise, this film belongs to a now unthinkable time when Marvel's licenses were all over the place and the company was hurtling towards bankruptcy (an unfortunate milestone it eventually hit in 1996) while DC remained ruler of the superhero movie roost.

Despite talk of a more experimental alternate cut that sounds marginally better than the direct-to-video version audiences received back in 1990, "Captain America" is still largely thought of as a dire misstep in comic book movie history — something exemplified by its ranking at 77 with a 3.2 rating based on 16,000 votes on the IMDb list.

A lot of the entries on this list are curios or quickly-forgotten disappointments, but "Batman & Robin" belongs to the category we'll call "historic blunders." This is a film that not only almost killed the Batman franchise but superhero movies altogether and which has been disowned by its star, George Clooney.

Directed by Joel Schumacher, this 1997 entry in the Batman saga took everything bad about 1995's "Batman Forever," which actually remains an overlooked Batman movie more groundbreaking than you realize, and ratcheted it up to 100. While "Forever" had been a lighter outing than its predecessor — Tim Burton's "weird experiment" "Batman Returns" — "Batman & Robin" was essentially one long toy commercial peppered with groan-worthy jokes and some of the worst acting yet committed to screen.

Despite its standing as one of the worst superhero movies ever made, it's not as if there's nothing to like about "Batman & Robin." Gotham City is actually quite impressively rendered in this film, and the production design as a whole was a technical achievement of sorts. But otherwise, this is one movie entirely deserving of its spot on the IMDb lowest-rated movies list, where it currently sits at number 82 with a 3.8 rating based on 275,000 votes.

Thankfully, Christopher Nolan would rescue the Batman saga in 2005 with his excellent "Batman Begins," but for a long while it looked as though "Batman & Robin" had felled the Dark Knight for good.

It's hard to overstate the impact 1978's "Superman" had on superhero movies. It wasn't just that the movie's popularity propelled it to becoming the first superhero blockbuster, director Richard Donner spent two of the toughest years of his life treating the subject matter with a kind of reverence that in the years prior to the film's release would have seemed laughable. Donner had a real respect for Superman as a character and his film played as a love letter to the Man of Steel and superheroes as a whole, legitimizing the genre of superhero movies at a time when they simply weren't a thing. 

Of course, "Superman" was a massive hit, which meant that Warner Bros. very quickly churned out as many sequels as it could. 1980's "Superman II" was actually a well-received follow-up which is currently the third highest-rated Superman movie on IMDb, with a 6.8 score and 118,000 votes. 1987's "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace," however, is very much at the other end of the scale, coming in at 86 in the IMDb lowest-rated list with a score of 3.7 based on 55,000 ratings, making it the lowest-ranked of all the films on this list.

"Superman IV" is one of a handful of superhero movies that actors actually regret making. Much like George Clooney with "Batman & Robin," star Christopher Reeve essentially disowned his fourth go round in the cape, describing the film in his 1999 autobiography thusly: "The less said about 'Superman IV,' the better." Director Sidney J. Furie came nowhere near the heights attained by Donner in his original effort, making a movie that tested so poorly he was ordered to axe about half an hour of footage before Warners would agree to put it out. A lackluster villain in the form of Mark Pillow's Nuclear Man and a troubled production charged with recreating Metropolis on English industrial parks didn't help, ultimately leading to what remains one of the worst superhero movies ever made.