10 Coolest Superhero Movie Scenes Ever

When you rattle off a list of your favourite actors to friends, or put together a playlist to listen to in the car, you’ll usually identify key moments that always stay with you, moments that encapsulate the whole for you. You don’t collate Jack Nicholson or John Cusack’s entire career retrospective in your head, or imagine all six minutes of Jeff Buckley’s version of ‘Hallelujah’. You think of moments.

Superhero movies, arguably more than any other genre or sub-genre of movie, are made of moments like that, because superhero movies, by virtue of the flashy powers and fights that make up so many of the important narrative beats, rely on cool moments to anchor what can often be rather implausible characterisation and tenuous plotting.

It’s been sixteen years since X-Men proved that a complex superhero comic book could be adapted to the big screen without looking like a neon cheesefest. It’s been twenty-seven years since Tim Burton proved that you could bring Batman to cinemas with tongue (mostly) removed from cheek.

In that time, superhero movies have gradually become the gold standard of summer blockbusters, and Marvel and DC have renewed their old rivalry in the multiplex. They’ve brought with them a host of incredibly cool moments - scenes and set-pieces that stick in the mind long after you’ve emerged, blinking, into the light of day again.

These are ten of the coolest superhero scenes in movie history... and bonus points if you can spot the connected movie references in the subheadings.

Before taking on adapting Marvel’s Spider-Man property for Sony in 2000 and presenting the world with the first Spider-Man movie in 2002, Sam Raimi was best known for the hyper-kinetic, heavily stylised Evil Dead films, supernatural horror movies with a wildly inventive shooting and editing style that would become his trademark over the years.

Spider-Man didn’t really evince that style, for the most part. You could see it a little in the frenetic acrobatics of the title character, but for the most part, Raimi had reined himself in, adopting a more traditional approach to filming… at least, until the sequel.

In Spider-Man 2, the movie’s eventual antagonist Otto Octavius, a brilliant nuclear scientist, has created a harness with four powerful robot arms controlled by a form of artificial intelligence, the better to handle dangerous materials. When an experiment goes wrong, he finds himself fused to and under the malign influence of the harness’ AI, which cause him to act in an increasingly homicidal manner.

This scene, which acts as the audience’s introduction to the terrifying power represented by the ‘tentacles’ of this new Doctor Octopus, was a deliberate step back to the kind of style and tone Raimi had originally become famous for.

In barely three minutes of violence, the threat represented by Doctor Octopus and those monstrous tentacles is fixed in the minds of the audience.

It’s a scene right out of an Evil Dead movie, the four serpentine arms moving of their own accord to viciously attack, mutilate and murder the surgeons attempting to remove the harness from a comatose Octavius.