The Ringers "The 50 Best Superhero Movies Of All Time"

quote:

---

Because this debate is already well-worn territory, we at The Ringer set out to develop a ranking that goes beyond personal opinions—to try to synthesize the overall goals and spirit of these films in order to identify the ideal superhero movies. In order to do that, we took into account four factors—Critical Success, Box Office Performance, Rewatchability, and Timelessness—and ran them through a fancy formula to come up with an overall score. (In an effort to streamline this list, animated movies were not considered.) Here’s how each of those factors were quantified:

Critical Success (RT): This one is the simplest—we used each movie’s score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Box Office Performance (ABOR): As much as you might like to think otherwise, one of the primary goals of a superhero movie is to make money; that’s why it was given equal weight in this process. Now, because we didn’t just want to throw in a movie’s total gross into a formula— those numbers are in the millions and that’d look unruly—and because it wouldn’t be fair to equate the box office performance of 1978’s Superman with 2013’s Man of Steel, we devised a little statistic called Adjusted Box Office Rating. ABOR is calculated by adjusting each movie’s domestic total gross to 2017’s standards, and then reverse ranking those adjusted totals, so that the highest total gets the highest score, and the lowest gets the lowest score. We know, this is deranged, but it’s worth it so just stick with us.

Rewatchability (RWA): For both Rewatchability and Timelessness, a select group of Ringer superhero experts were asked to fill out a survey containing two questions for each movie that was in consideration. The first question was, “On a scale of 1-10 (1 being ‘absolutely no’ and 10 being ‘absolutely yes’), would you rewatch this movie?” The group’s answers were then averaged to achieve the RWA score.

Timelessness (RNA): The second question was “On a scale of 1-10 (1 being ‘absolutely yes’ and 10 being ‘absolutely no’), could this movie be improved by being remade?” This question hopes to determine how close to perfection each movie came—the more it could use a remake, the argument goes, the less perfect it is. Like RWA, the group’s answers were then averaged to achieve the RNA score.

After getting those stats, each movie’s numbers were run through the following formula: RT + ABOR + RWA + RNA. Each film was then ranked from highest to lowest score. All of that is to say, the higher the score a superhero movie has, the better it is.

---