Each passing year, superhero movies and television programming represent a larger portion of the entertainment landscape. On television, Superheroes have a long, proud tradition of animated content with the occasional live action breakout like Wonder Woman or The Incredible Hulk, but over the last decade or so, interest in the genre has expanded from children and niche viewers to mainstream audiences at large...and superhero tv shows are cleaning up network by network. The CW got in the game early with Arrow and shows no signs of slowing down, ABC followed with Agents of SHIELD, FOX has Gotham, NBC tried with Constantine, CBS has Supergirl, and Netflix is setting the benchmark for superhero TV with Daredevil and Jessica Jones. Don’t expect that to slow down anytime soon, either. Networks are either expanding on the programming they have with spinoffs and sister shows, or looking to get in the business with projects like Legion and The Hellfire Club at FX or the in-development Watchmen series at HBO. .
And the same is true of movies. Marvel Studios, who has reliably provided us with a hero fix every year since 2010, now delivers two movies a year and plans to up that number to three starting in 2017. At Warner Bros., the incubating DC Universe is about to launch in a big way with next year’s Suicide Squad and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Fox is keeping the mutant world well represented by introducing a new generation in X-Men: Apocalypse and Gambit. As a result we’re seeing more superhero content than ever before, so as a send off to 2015 we've rounded up 10 of the major superhero moments from the last year. Watch the video countdown below video, or scroll through to read the list.
'Batman v Superman' Trailer Reveals Doomsday
Ever since Warner Bros. announced Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice at last year's Comic-Con, fans have eagerly sought out any intel they could find about the superhero showdown to end all superhero showdowns...that is, until the most recent trailer revealed that the two will mend fences before long in order to take down a much larger threat – Doomsday, the monstrous killing machine engineered from General Zod's DNA. It's a strange decision for a film whose entire marketing strategy, down to the title itself, hinges on the concept of pitting two of the most famous superheroes in history against one another.
But the trailer didn't stop there, it packed in reveals and teases with potentially massive DCU implications. We now know why Wonder Woman shows up to the party, and even got a money shot of the Holy Trinity united. And hey, is that a boom tube in the background? Are those parademons? Is the film laying the groundwork for the eventual appearance of Darkseid? Questions and theories abounded after excited fans analyzed the new footage, and we still don't even know how the rumored cameos from Aquaman and The Flash fit into the whole crazy package! For now, all we can do is speculate and stand in awe of Jesse Eisenberg's bizarre take on Lex Luthor.
'The Flash' & 'Arrow' Crossover Sets Up 'Legends of Tomorrow'
While DC's shared cinematic universe is still getting off the ground, the televised DC Universe is well underway on The CW. What started with Arrow, a single superhero series seemingly out of place on a network that often driven by angsty high-concept romances, turned into a one-two punch when The Flash debuted last year to overwhelmingly positive response. Now, that universe is set to further expand with the soon-to-be-released DC's Legends of Tomorrow, which will see guest stars from both shows spin off into their own time-traveling crusade against the immortal villain Vandal Savage.
This year's Arrow and The Flash crossover event set up the stakes of Legends, introducing Savage and his fearsome powers while also servicing the original two series with plot points that are sure to have major ramifications on the homefront. As we saw in last year's crossover event, the disparate tones between the two shows only highlight their respective strengths when teamed up. The Flash's light-hearted goofiness and earnest sentimentality should clash with Arrow's more straight-laced flair for the dramatic, but the contrast between the two only makes them pop more vibrantly. As a result, the two-night crossover event was a great success, reaffirming the fun of the universe they've built and stoking the desire to see it continue to grow.
'Jesssica Jones' Braves Uncharted Territory
Marvel's darkest endeavor to date – and that's really saying something in a year that saw Kingpin decapitate a man with a car door -- Jessica Jones is a highlight of the year in television and a landmark storytelling achievement in using superhero mythology as a means explore complex and mature issues. Series creator Melissa Rosenberg and her team of writers fearlessly tackled some of the grizzliest subjects on the market from rape to addiction to abuse, and what it takes to survive them, without ever becoming dry or dreary. No matter how deep the series plumbs, and it goes way deep, it's always captivating character drama livened up by the occasional bar room brawl.
A huge amount of the credit for that is owed to Krysten Ritter, who is electric as Jessica, Marvel's first title female superhero and a wholly unique character creation. Jessica Jones walks through the world like an open wound, bristling at any contact, diluting the pain through whiskey, hard work, and more whiskey. She's aggressive, unapologetic, and short tempered, but she's also achingly human and unusually nuanced for what is traditionally a pop genre. And she is rivaled by an equally impressive villain. As Kilgrave, the mind-controlling sociopath who all but destroyed Jessica's life, David Tennant is alarmingly charismatic, alternating seamlessly between his most alluring and terrifying qualities, never settling for a simplistic mustache-twirling villainy. He is the embodiment of unchecked privilege gone wrong; a self-serving narcissist who has never been told no. The dynamic between the two characters is one of the most complicated explorations of abuse and victimhood ever put on screen and a testament to the heights that can be achieved within the genre space when the creators are unafraid to do something unprecedented and trust their audience at the same time.
'Fantastic Four' Misses the Mark
With Hugh Jackman set to hang up the claws after one last Wolverine film and the key X-Men: First Class players nearing the end of their contracts, Fox is looking to establish a new set of leading heroes to front their superhero franchises. They're hedging their bets on Channing Tatum's Gambit to provide a new star-powered leading man, but this year was also supposed to see the rise of the rebooted Fantastic Four. X-Men director Bryan Singer even teased the possibility of a crossover between the two franchises at one point. Unfortunately, for the studio and fans of the classic superhero team alike, the film was a major misfire.
There's been plenty of finger-pointing when it comes to the failure of Fantastic Four. Soon after the film's release reports surfaced of erratic on-set behavior and indecisive leadership from director Josh Trank, who in turn called out the studio on Twitter, claiming that there used to be a "fantastic" version of the film that the world will never see. But blame game aside, the final result was a movie with threads of obvious potential that never added up to anything, building a thin story that visited an entirely new dimension, but somehow still felt small despite the apocalyptic stakes. Whether Fantastic Four will have another shot remains to be seen, but for the time being, the critical and commercial failure seems to have halted the entire franchise dead in its tracks.
'Suicide Squad' Comic-Con Sizzle Reel Leaks Online
With each passing year, it becomes harder and harder for studios and networks to keep their exclusive Comic-Con content exclusive. Rapidly advancing cell phone and tablet technology, along with the instant share social media apps that come with them have made it nearly impossible to keep a lid on the Hall H sneak peeks. There were plenty of casualties this year, including leaked trailers for Deadpool and X-Men: Apocalypse, but it was Warner Bros' Suicide Squad trailer that had everybody absolutely freaking out over the first look at Jared Leto's Joker in action. Despite expressing their disappointment over the leaked footage, Warner Bros. quickly released an HD version of the trailer rather than let audiences get their first impression from a blurry second-hand video.
And so we all got an early look at the "Skwad", including Will Smith's Deadshot, Cara Delevingne's Enchantress, and Margot Robbie's scene-stealing Harley Quinn. While everybody was clamoring to get a look at the latest incarnation of the clown prince of crime, it was Harley who took center stage in the trailer with a committed performance from the perfectly cast Robbie and her instantly iconic costume update. Ultimately, the Comic-Con leak may have done more good than harm. It forced the studio to advance their marketing campaign, but it also got the fanbase more excited than ever for the anti-hero ensemble flick.
'Ant-Man's Climactic Set Piece
The cries of longing for Edgar Wright's version of Ant-Man may never truly die out, but despite the pre-production turmoil, Marvel and director Peyton Reed managed to deliver a superhero origin story that was offbeat, funny, wasn't afraid to get a little weird with it, and introduced a new hero who'll be able to hold his own alongside The Avengers.
And since Reed, Paul Rudd and co-writer Adam McKay worked off of Wright's script, it's still easy to feel his influence throughout the film, perhaps never more so than the climactic battle between Ant-Man and Yellowjacket. While the film's other set-pieces use Ant-Man's shrinking abilities to exciting effect, especially in his showdown with Anthony Mackie's Falcon, it's the final fight scene that makes use of the Pym Particle discs' enlarging abilities with wildly entertaining results. Set in a child's bedroom, a Thomas the Tank Engine toy alternately becomes the setting for an epic showdown, a weapon, and a punchline. It's a cleverly constructed battle sequence that is emblematic of the film as a whole – a light-hearted and unique heist actioner that carved out its own quantum corner in the MCU.
The Mjolnir Gag in 'Avengers: Age of Ultron'
After the runaway success of Marvel's first major superhero team up, 2012's The Avengers, which shattered box office records and earned nearly unanimous critical acclaim, Joss Whedon's follow-up, Avengers: Age of Ultron, turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. While it certainly wasn't a box office failure, the sequel never quite measured up to the titanic success of its predecessor, and as a lynchpin in the overarching narrative of the MCU at large, Ultron suffered from an overabundance of characters and the burden of setting up Phase 3.
However, even with that unwieldy task in front of him, Whedon managed to infuse the film with some of his trademark moments of wit and narrative handicraft, and none had a better payoff than the Mjolnir gag. It starts as a moment of pure fun in the first act when The Avengers let their hair down for a party and Thor challenges his fellow heroes to lift the Mighty Hammer over a few brews, proving one by one that they're not worthy...well, Cap might be close. In true Whedon fashion, what seems like an inconsequential bit resurfaces later as a critical character reveal when the newborn Vision casually hands Mjolnir to Thor, unaware of the implications, allowing the characters and the audience to instantly trust this bizarre and unfathomably powerful new creature without a measure of doubt. It was not only downright clever storytelling, but also an extremely satisfying cinematic experience every time a theater full of movie-goers gasped in unison.
'Daredevil's Fight Scenes
On April 10th, Marvel and Netflix launched their highly-anticipated collaboration with Daredevil – an especially bold move given that, by and large, the supersensory-enabled hero was only known to the general audience for his much maligned 2003 movie featuring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, and a whole lot of awkwardness. Whatever rebranding Marvel had to pull off, they did it without a hitch with a first-rate cast, led by Charlie Cox as the title hero and Vincent D'Onofrio as his nemesis Wilson Fisk, and a story that invested in Matt Murdoch's unique pathos. While every hero has their own reason for suiting up, Daredevil's impetus is rooted in an exquisite cocktail of Catholic guilt and martial arts discipline, muddled with daddy issues and a hint of anger management.
The series paid equal attention to Murdoch and Fisk, giving both well-crafted and contained character arcs, and making Daredevil one of Marvel Studios' most compelling narratives to date, but it's the intricate and energetic fight choreography that emerged as the show's crowning achievement. Watching Daredevil is as much a kinetic experience as it is emotional or intellectual. While almost all of the first season's 13 episodes contain a fight worth writing home about, it's the second episode's single-take, six-and-a-half minute brawl that had audiences' jaws on the floor. The protracted punch-fest pits Daredevil against a string of thugs in a dimly-lit hallway, as he fights to take them down one by one to save the life of a child. The hits land hard, but no one goes down easy, and as the minutes tick on, you watch the hero's fatigue set in as stumbles and rests between blows, before bucking up again and again until the battle is won. It's an iconic set-piece, arguably the best fight scene in television history, and a "holy shit" moment that put Daredevil on the pop culture map.
'Deadpool' Gets His Hard "R"
Ever since his less-than-auspicious debut in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Deadpool fans have been clamoring to see the Merc with the Mouth done right. After a pitch perfect test footage reel popped up on online, inciting an internet frenzy, Deadpool finally got the green-light late last year. Then came the ratings wait, because Deadpool done PG-13 isn't really Deadpool at all. Even if Ryan Reynolds, who was seemingly born to play the role, was a lock to return, and even if the test footage nailed the idiosyncratic, amoral humor, it wasn't worth a chimichanga without the R-rating that would let the motor-mouthed assassin spew profanities while violently dispatching criminals.
After months of hand-wringing and speculation, Fox finally confirmed that rating through a fittingly mischievous April Fools Day Prank that saw Deadpool walk into frame during ExtraTV's exclusive PG-13 announcement and bash in Mario Lopez's brains, before breaking the fourth wall to promise "Deadpool, of course, will be Rated-R". It was the perfect way to announce Deadpool as a Hard-R superhero and ensure fans that the film would be as foul-mouthed, ultra-violent, and irreverent as the source material.
'Spider-Man' Joins the MCU
This year in superheroes kicked off on a mighty high note when Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures did the unthinkable, striking a long-speculated, even longer wished-for deal to introduce Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe proper. Finally, Spidey came home to Marvel and fans would get to see Peter Parker's quips come face-to-face with Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark snark. While some were sad to see Andrew Garfield leave the role behind, the inter-studio deal provided an opportunity to hard reboot a franchise that floundered with The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
Ultimately, Marvel and Sony opted to age-down significantly, casting the acrobatically-inclined Tom Holland in the coveted role of the web-slinger, who will swing into next year's Captain America: Civil War before kicking off a new franchise of his own in 2017.
For more of Collider's Best of 2015 coverage, click here.