Every Marvel Movie Ever Made, Ranked From Worst to Best

In 1939, pulp-magazine publisher Martin Goodman decided to give the new medium of comic books a shot. He called his company “Timely.” Its first publication was a series called Marvel Comics.

In time, the company’s flagship title became its name, and Marvel Comics became synonymous with superheroes across the globe. Although Marvel became one of the two dominant forces in comics by the mid-1960s, it took another 20 years before Marvel ever got a movie into theaters, and then almost 20 more years before those adaptations even came close to capturing the energy of literary Marvel Universe. 20 year after that, Marvel has scaled to the very top of the Hollywood food chain, pumping out multiple movies every year, and laying claim to the title of the biggest box-office hit in history.

In the eight decades between Marvel Comics #1 and the construction of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, more than 70 big-screen movies have been made out of the company’s hundreds of properties. (That number doesn’t include things like the 1994 The Fantastic Four that was produced but never released, or assorted direct-to-video animated features such as Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow.) The list below contains them all, ranked from the most brutally unwatchable to the most superhuman entertainment. It will differ from other lists like this based on the author’s personal biases (He’s the guy who wrote an entire book about Spider-Man, after all), but it is nonetheless backed up by a lifetime of research into this extremely dorky field.