Folks, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but comic book movies sort of took over the cinematic experience over the last ten years. Iron Man was just outside the decade, yeah, but it kicked off an era of superheroes, mega-villains, caped crusaders, and crime-fighters flying across the screen almost every month of the year. Sure, there are drawbacks—hello, Mr. Scorsese!—but the genre, at its best and biggest, became something to unite us. These "event" films created the modern-day watercooler talk; think of Avengers: Infinity War's "snap", or the Marvel v. Sony Spider-Man hullabaloo, or the first reactions to every single thing Jared Leto did as The Joker. For ten years, comic book movies have been synonymous with pop culture as a whole.

But! That doesn't mean there isn't a vast range in quality to these bad boys. The comic book movies released over the past decade have ranged from moving works of art that literally changed pop culture forever to straight-up unwatchable disasters that make you question every choice that led you to that theater seat. So, naturally, I've ranked them. All of them, from worst to best. Scroll on through the list below, and please remember that A) Comic book and movie fandom is a place for positivity and if your favorite landed somewhere un-ideal, I still think highly of you as a person, and B) Should you feel the uncontrollable need to yell about it, you can find me on Twitter. Love a good, healthy convo.

RELATED: The 20 Best Comedies of the 2010s, Ranked

56) 'Fantastic Four'

Fantastic Four Movie
Image via Fox

Director: Josh Trank

Writers: Josh Trank, Jeremy Slater, Simon Kinberg

Cast: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell

One of the hottest messes to ever hit a movie screen, and maybe the only film in history to follow a 1.25-act structure. Genuinely baffling. Whether it was on-set turmoil, a turbulent editing process, Josh Trank’s inexperience, or something else altogether we might never know, but the result is a movie about The Fantastic Four—Marvel’s colorful, super-powered founding family—completely lacking any humor, charm, chemistry, plot, or, most importantly, the one interesting shot from the trailer of The Thing jumping out of an airplane. The luckiest member of the cast is Toby Kebbell as Victor Von Doom, who effs off to another dimension only to return for the most lifeless final showdown in comic book history. The rest of this supremely talented cast—Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, Jaime Bell, come on—don’t get a single genuine moment to work with, unless you count Mara’s Herculean effort of keeping a straight face under a wig so distracting it deserves its own IMDB credit. Just...a mess. A mess!

55) 'Jonah Hex'

Josh Brolin in Jonah Hex
Image via Warner Bros.

Director: Jimmy Hayward

Writers: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor

Cast: Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malkovich

Jonah Hex is a strange, kind’ve fascinating relic from a time when the MCU was just three movies old—and that’s two Iron Mans and a barely-counts Incredible Hulk— and Green Lantern was still a year away. Studios were getting the earliest inkling that people were super into comic book movies again and started digging into their vaults for any IP available, resulting in something like this 80-minute shoulder-shrug of a movie that feels like it was finished about a week out from picture lock. Josh Brolin does his darndest as the scarred title cowboy with the ability to raise the dead but not even he could pull this DOA clunker outta’ the grave. Better left buried.

54) 'Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance'

The Ghost Rider looking directly at the camera in the film 'Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.'
Image via Columbia

Directors: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor

Writers: Scott M. Gimple, Seth Hoffman, David S. Goyer

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Johnny Whitworth, Ciarán Hinds

I’ll say this: It is a genuinely impressive feat to take Nicolas Cage at his most batty playing a vengeful demon biker with a flaming skull for a head and make it boring. But somehow, against all odds, everyone involved with Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance pulled it off. Set 8 years after the first Ghost Rider movie, which at least had a novelty factor going for it, Spirit of Vengeance sees good ol’ Johnny Blaze racing against Satan himself (Ciarán Hinds) to save the soul of a young boy named Danny (Fergus Riordan) who is caught up in a diabolical conspiracy. Read that sentence back and tell me how this movie—which also boasts some of the worst 3D CGI this side of the year 1953—manages to be so uninteresting. Much like Cage himself, it simply cannot be explained.

53) 'Green Lantern'

Ryan Reynolds in Green Lantern
Image via Warner Bros.

Director: Martin Campbell

Writers: Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, Michael Goldenberg

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Mark Strong

How often is a movie so bad that the main star is still making jokes about it eight years later? Truly, there’s nothing to be said here about Green Lantern that Ryan Reynolds hasn’t already said. They CGI’d the dang mask on to his face, for goodness sake. I would pay a huge sum to go back and be a fly on the wall when that decision was made. There’s also the Oa digital effects that aimed for Star Wars but looked more like a computer hangover-vomited ones and zeroes onto a blank canvas. Oh and also also poor Peter Sarsgaard’s massive head as Hector Hammond, a look that’s comics-accurate but rendered objectively hilarious because of how straight this movie played it. No part of Green Lantern looked good, so its aggressively mediocre script stood out with all the Yellow Energy in the cosmos. Really, though, the greatest crime of Green Lantern is making one of the best, most interesting characters in DC Comics canon pretty much untouchable for all this time. HBO Max finally decided to give it another go nine years later, so hopefully technology has advanced to the point where we can [checks notes] craft a tiny green mask to fit over someone’s eyes and nose.

52) 'Suicide Squad'

Suicide Squad Cast
Image via Warner Bros.

Writer/Director: David Ayer

Cast: Margot Robbie, Will Smith, Jared Leto, Viola Davis

What in the name of Jared Leto’s forehead tattoos happened with Suicide Squad? As multiple reports might suggest, a combination of studio panic and the consistently-souring public opinion of the DCEU caused David Ayer’s grittier take to be chopped and screwed into something closer to the trailers’ candy-coated Guardians of the Galaxy-esque vibe. The result is a neon-lit pile of cringiness, featuring a soundtrack of songs your dad thinks are cool to play at the BBQ after three light beers. (I still wake up at night in a cold sweat thinking of this movie’s Eminem needle drop. The horror, the horror.) To be fair, the premise was always an uphill battle: In the aftermath of Batman vs. Superman, Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has the genius-brain idea of dealing with the next Kryptonian-level threat to Earth by assembling a team of expendable criminals, including but not limited to a sniper (Will Smith), a mentally ill woman with a baseball bat (Margot Robbie), a guy who can throw boomerangs (Jai Courtney), and another guy who can climb real good (Adam Beach). That already rocky road then gets edited into near-incomprehension; just enough footage of Leto’s Joker was left in to make his presence hilariously distracting, while a character like Katana (Karen Fukuhara) gets pushed so far to the side that Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) introduces her with the worst bit of exposition ever said out loud on-screen. (You know the line.) Just completely damaged from top to bottom.

51) 'Sin City: A Dame to Kill For'

Josh Brolin and Eva Green in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Directors: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller

Writer: Frank Miller

Cast: Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Eva Green

How much longer must I yell “Eva Green deserves better” into the void before the universe listens? Sin City: A Dame to Kill was definitely not the answer. This 2014 follow-up to the surprisingly slick 2005 original is the definition of style over substance. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller co-direct four different tales of wise-guys, gamblers, and degenerates that occasionally interweave but are mostly connected by the fact they’re all unpleasant to sit through.

50) 'X-Men: Apocalypse'

Oscar Isaac in X-Men: Apocalypse
Image via 20th Century Fox

Director: Bryan Singer

Writer: Simon Kinberg

Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar Isaac

The second someone decides to plaster enough purple prosthetics to kill a rhino over Oscar Isaac’s face, someone in pre-production needs to speak up. X-Men: Apocalypse is what this franchise looks like on auto-pilot, a big, loud, “event” film with no soul to speak of. Sound and fury, signifying nothing, etc etc. A large bulk of this very long film sees resurrected mutant-god En Sabah Nur (Isaac) assembling his four horsemen, which leads to Magneto (Michael Fassbender) trying to decide if he wants to be a bad guy or not (shocker!) and the world needing to be saved from a vague cataclysmic event (double shocker!). There is not a single thing in X-Men Apocalypse that no other comic book movie—including several other X-Men movies—hasn’t already shown you, but Singer and Co. forge ahead anyway over two-plus hours to a CGI-barf climax that sloppily sets up the Dark Phoenix saga like an afterthought.

49) 'Hellboy'

David Harbour in Hellboy (2019)
Image via Lionsgate

Director: Neil Marshall

Writer: Andrew Cosby

Cast: David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane

Are you the edgiest teen in your local mall’s food court who knows how cool it is to do swears and troll newbs? Then I apologize for ranking Hellboy, your favorite movie of 2019, so low on this list. Instead of giving Guillermo del Toro a third film in his Hellboy series, Lionsgate decided to reboot the character, handing the director’s chair to Neil Marshall—who was behind the incredibly tight The Descent and some of the best Game of Thrones episodes out there—and recasting the title role with David Harbour at the height of his charm offensive. That’s a pretty solid crew, so it’s double the shame that this movie leaned so hard into the fact it’s R-rated that it forgot to come up with an actual story, resulting in something with all the blood and guts of Mike Mignola’s source material but none of the pathos, charm, or intrigue. The first time I watched this movie, it was an airplane cut without curse words, violence, or innuendo, and I truly have never been so confused as to what the hell was going on in my entire life.

48) 'Dark Phoenix'

Jean Grey with fire cracks on her face in the movie Dark Phoenix.
Image via 20th Century Fox

Writer/Director: Simon Kinberg

Cast: Sophie Turner, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jessica Chastain

If Apocalypse is the X-Men on auto-pilot, Dark Phoenix is the franchise on life support. I don’t even know if I consider Simon Kinberg’s directorial debut a “bad” movie as much as I think it’s...nothing. It’s empty air where a glorious shining bright spot should be. A huge part of the problem is the script taking the story out of Jean Grey’s (Sophie Turner) hands, largely turning her into a mute atomic bomb with only a sliver of motivation or internal conflict. It certainly doesn’t help that the antagonists of the film borrowed their look from Signs but never really explained exactly why they want the Phoenix Force. Highlights of the film, by a wide margin, are Michael Fassbender cranking every acting muscle in his body to 11 while aggressively screaming at a helicopter, followed closely by nobody behind the scenes noticing that Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) getting dragged up those steps looked way, way funnier than intended.

47) 'Thor: The Dark World'

Chris Hemsworth in Thor: The Dark World
Image via Marvel Studios

Director: Alan Taylor

Writers: Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Christopher Eccleston

The greatest trick Marvel ever pulled was using Avengers: Endgame to make Thor: The Dark World a vital piece of the MCU, perhaps as a way to get everyone to stop dunking on this aggressively forgettable film. Folks, the dunkings were, are, and will remain warranted. At this point in the MCU’s history, A) Nobody had quite figured out how to perfectly harness Chris Hemsworth’s natural charisma without relying on a lack of sleeves, and B) that Marvel Movie Formula was showing, so you’re mostly bored for two-ish hours as another threat hunts down a vaguely mystical glowing object. Those Dark Elves, man. It would not shock me if there are still people out there who don’t even know Christopher Eccleston played a Marvel villain.

46) 'Justice League'

Gadot, Momoa, Fisher in Justice League
Image via Warner Bros.

Directors: Zack Snyder, Joss Whedon

Writers: Chris Terrio, Joss Whedon

Cast: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Henry Cavill

One day my brain might accept the fact that Hollywood, after forty years, finally brought a live-action Justice League movie to theaters and it was so aggressively forgettable that—and this is not a joke—I drafted this ranking six times before realizing I had just forgotten to include it. After original director and DCEU architect Zack Snyder departed the project, Warner Bros. bought in Joss Whedon to finish production and jazz up the story, which is kind’ve like sweetening your coffee with orange juice. Two perfectly good things that just don’t mix, and the result is a cobbled-together Frankenstein’s monster of a movie filled with awkward sewn-in humor, wild tonal shifts, truly horrendous CGI mustache removal thanks to the re-shoots, and a janky narrative that stinks of last-minute changes. (I will never forget the story progressing because the Justice League just sort’ve left a Mother Box lying around, where Steppenwolf picked it up off-screen.) One of those rare movies where literally everyone involved in the production and the characters they are portraying on-screen deserve better than what they got.

45) 'Kingsman: The Golden Circle'

Kingsman: The Golden Circle Cast
Image via 20th Century Fox

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Writers: Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaugh

Cast: Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Halle Berry, Mark Strong, Julianne Moore

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is proof positive that when it comes to sequels, bigger is not always better. Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service came out of nowhere to become a hit because it cheekily played up spy genre tropes to their most ridiculous degree; it was ridiculous, but the audience and the movie worked in tandem, both equally in on the joke. The Golden Circle puts a cowboy hat on a cowboy hat and becomes a self-parody of a parody. Some stuff works like gangbusters—Channing Tatum was born to play a whiskey-themed super-spy—but the Golden Circle plays with the audience’s suspension of disbelief until it snaps, and relying heavily on the comedic stylings of Elton John isn’t going to fix it. Julianne Moore's role is fun, though, a shame she couldn't leave that one room.

(No but seriously why does Elton John get so much screen time in this movie?)

44) 'Iron Man 2'

Director: Jon Favreau

Writer: Justin Theroux

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Mickey Rourke, Gwyneth Paltrow

Iron Man 2 flies directly into the same problem that derailed Spider-Man 3 in 2007. There’s certainly plenty of fun to be had here—at least 60% of it on display in this GIF—but there’s just too much crammed into this metal suit to have any room to breath. The first appearance of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. Sam Rockwell’s devious weapon’s manufacturer Justin Hammer. The iconically baffling extra-ness of everything Mickey Rourke does as Whiplash. Just a whole lot going on here, too much, which squeezes the life out of the simple, Robert Downey Jr.-led charm of the first film.

43) 'Kick-Ass 2'

Aaron Taylor Johnson and Chloe Grace Moretz in Kick-Ass 2
Image via Universal

Writer/Director: Jeff Wadlow

Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chloë Grace Moretz

While the first Kick-Ass movie, based on the comics by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., confidently straddled the line between endearingly indulgent and obnoxiously in-your-face, its 2013 sequel leaps right the heck over it, saying “this character is named The Motherfucker and that’s the whole joke.” Picking up about two years after the first film, Kick-Ass 2 follows the titular teenage vigilante (Aaron-Taylor Johnson) from one bloody scenario to the other—stopping along the way to waste both Jim Carrey and John Leguizamo—with none of the cheekiness or wit of Matthew Vaughn’s original. Alas, two asses kicked turned out to be one too many asses.

42) 'The Amazing Spider-Man 2'

Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Image via Sony

Director: Marc Webb

Writers: Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Jeff Pinkner

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Dane DeHaan

I’ll ya’ what, if you want to ever adapt to screen the death of Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone)—one of the most enduringly tragic, poignant moments in comic book history—you probably shouldn’t tack it onto a film that also serves as a full origin story for Electro (Jamie Foxx), a look at Harry Osborne’s (Dane Dehaan) transformation into Green Goblin, all bookended by Paul Giamatti in a giant robot rhino costume. I like Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker, equal parts quippy and vulnerable, but he can’t string together a movie that serves as the first egregiously obvious example of a story that completely fails thanks to a studio having its eyes in (sinister) six different directions at once.

41) 'Kick-Ass'

Aaron Taylor Johnson as Kick-Ass or Dave Lizewski in Kick-Ass
Image via Lionsgate

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Writers: Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman

Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Chloe Grace Moretz, Nicolas Cage

Kick-Ass is…a lot . It’s a whole lot of movie, a whole lot of limb-snapping, a whole lot of headshots and dismemberments and a then-12-year-old Chloe Grace Moretz calling people “cunts” before stabbing them through the chest. The easiest knock on Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s comic is that it’s try-hard, and woo boy, it is trying really, really hard. But at some point the movie starts to bask in its own capital-e Edginess so aggressively that it rounds back to being a pretty solid time as long as you look at it as the live-action cartoon that it is, a strategy that Vaughn and co-writer Jane Goldman would eventually put to much more successful use in Kingsman: The Secret Service.

40) 'The Wolverine'

Hugh Jackman in The Wolverine
Image via 20th Century Fox

Director: James Mangold

Writer: Mark Bomback, Scott Frank

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Will Yun Lee, Tao Okamoto

In the strange 20th Century Fox era known as “Wolverine Is The Only X-Men Character”, James Mangold’s The Wolverine lands firmly right in the middle of the pack, leaping miles above the bar set by X-Men Origins: Wolverine but still not touching Mangold’s adamantium masterpiece, Logan. The film takes its titular mutant (Hugh Jackman) back to Japan, a country he hasn’t seen since WWII, where he tangoes with the Yakuza and a couple of Samurai alongside assassin Yukio (Rila Fukushima) without the aid of his healing factor. Jackman puts in a surprisingly touching performance in a film that forces the character to face the idea of death, and Mangold directs the hell out of a few thrilling set-pieces. And then, out of freaking nowhere, The Wolverine squanders a whole lotta’ goodwill with a climax so randomly cartoonish it feels copy-pasted from another project.

39) 'The Amazing Spider-Man'

Director: Marc Webb

Writers: James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent, Steve Kloves

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans

Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man
Image via Sony

Arriving just five years after Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy came to a close and advertising the same origin story we already knew by heart—at least Uncle Ben doesn’t wear a pearl necklace—Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man had one heck of a job making the case for why it needed to exist in the first place. It...did not succeed, but the genuinely sparkling chemistry at its center between Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker and Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy keeps this movie from being a complete waste of time. I also do dig the decision to use the less-known Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) and his transition into the monstrous Lizard as the main antagonist—way more comic book movies need to dig deep into the rogues gallery—but the script just re-heats the leftovers of past Spider-Man movies for his story and relationship with Peter.

38) 'Avengers: Age of Ultron'

Avengers: Age of Ultron
Image via Disney

Writer/Director: Joss Whedon

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, James Spader

Okay, I believe we are officially through this decade’s lowest tier, so let’s get in. to. it. Avengers: Age of Ultron is proof that when the stakes are this high and you’re this deep into building a universe, relying solely on charm isn’t going to cut it. (Although, as a staunch lover of banter, that “lifting the hammer” scene does still do it for me.) It’s pretty well-documented that Joss Whedon didn’t have the best time fitting his ideas for this film into Marvel’s overall plan, as evidenced by the parts where Thor hilariously flies off out of nowhere to his vision cave(?) then comes back and is like “Hark! Thor: Ragnaraok and Avengers: Infinity War will be released on November 3, 2017 and April 27, 2019, respectively.But pretty much every moment after Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) accidentally bring a human-hating A.I. named Ultron (James Spader) to life is just an isolated set-piece with nothing behind it. It is cool to see Hulk fight the Hulkbuster armor, it is cool to watch Vision (Paul Bettany) come to life, it is cool to see a whole city get plucked out of the Earth. But unlike a good percentage of the MCU, Age of Ultron never really gives you a reason to care outside of that surface-level shininess. If you’re curating an MCU re-watch, the second Avengers team-up can be dropped faster than Wanda Maximoff’s accent and forgotten just as quickly as everyone on the team forgot about her brother.

37) 'Iron Man 3'

Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark sitting next to his armor in Iron Man 3
Image via Marvel Studios

Director: Shane Black

Writer: Shane Black, Drew Pearce

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Guy Pearce, Gwyneth Paltrow

The Mandarin twist is good! I will go to my grave defending Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery! That mid-movie left turn in Iron Man 3 is the exact type of cheekiness I wanted from a Shane Black-directed Marvel movie and the man behind Lethal Weapon and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang did not disappoint. As for the rest of the movie, you know, it’s fine, if for no other reason than gifting us the image of Guy Pearce breathing fire. As long as you completely ignore the ending as hard as the actual MCU did, Iron Man 3 remains an extremely watchable film—especially around Christmas!—that is, at least, one of the more truly unique Marvel movies to ever come out of the Disney era.