10 Movies So Good They Ruined Genres

2. The Dark Knight

Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight totally reinvented what a superhero movie could be: with its gritty, operatic tone, superb direction and Oscar-winning villain, it was perhaps the first superhero movie that could ever be taken totally seriously as a genre film in its own right. As much as it still revolved around a man dressing up as a bat and punching people, it was shot through with all the tenacious seriousness of a Michael Mann movie.

The film inspired many imitators in both the superhero genre and blockbuster films as a whole, though only Logan has come even remotely close to successfully nailing a similarly audacious, genre-bending tone.

There's a reason why serious superhero movies aren't really in vogue anymore: Marvel Studios realised they could have a far easier time - and make more money - with lightly enjoyable, family-friendly superhero films, and avoid the Dark Knight comparisons at the same time.

Nolan managed to strike an incredibly delicate tonal balance with his film, and practically every comic book film that's tried to ape his mature tone hasn't stuck the landing anywhere near as well. Nobody has more aggressively attempted to follow Nolan's lead than Zack Snyder, and Watchmen turned out an ambitious mess, while Man of Steel was a tonal car crash.

If you look at the highest-grossing superhero movies of all time, they're almost exclusively MCU movies and sillier, lighter comic book films like Wonder Woman and Deadpool, because why risk alienating audiences with "grimdark" stylings when you can just play it broad and fun?

There were of course serious attempts at superhero films before The Dark Knight, but Nolan's film is unarguably the zenith of that style, and continues to embarrass pretty much any movie that attempts to follow its lead.