10 Great Movies That Accidentally Made Cinema Worse
5. Batman Begins Ushered In An Era Of Needlessly Gritty Reboots
Batman Begins is one of the most influential movies of the 2000s - a gritty reboot of a beloved comic book IP, shaking off his goofy prior interpretations and treating him in a more-or-less grounded and "realistic" fashion.
The success of Batman Begins and its sequel The Dark Knight prompted Hollywood to use that restrained style as a template for retooling a glut of stagnant franchises, whether it suited them or not.
Perhaps the most immediately divisive example is the DCEU's Man of Steel, which gave Superman (Henry Cavill) the dubious "grimdark" treatment no matter the inherent hopefulness and optimism of Superman in the comics.
There are far worse examples, though: the Kristen Stewart-starring Snow White and the Huntsman, Robocop, Josh Trank's Fantastic Four, and 2018's Robin Hood, to name just a few.
Not every property is suitable for this sort of tone, and the results are typically disastrously jarring when filmmakers get it wrong, because convincing audiences to take fundamentally silly material seriously require a ton of hard work from a visionary director (see: Christopher Nolan).