7. They Are Fundamentally Silly
Warner Bros.As much as certain filmmakers might try to convince you otherwise, the whole comic book movie phenomenon is fundamentally silly, and there's nothing wrong with that. A guy flying around Gotham City dressed as a giant bat? A kid gets bitten by a radioactive spider and starts web-slinging around New York City? In a few short weeks, we're going to have a talking, anthropomorphic raccoon gracing our screens with a giant tree monster in Guardians of the Galaxy. While some of these movies embrace their silliness, they all should. Christopher Nolan has most famously tried to push the comic book movie into the serious stratosphere of the hard-boiled crime genre, and it's hard to deny the grand job he's done, yet even so, it is still at its core a daft concept, and one that needs to balance Nolan's somber tonality with the entire reason anyone reads a comic book in the first place: for fun. Even look at the most serious-minded comics out there, like Alan Moore's superb Watchmen, and it concludes with a gigantic squid attacking New York. Granted this was changed for the movie, but how is that not completely ridiculous? Comic book movies are insanely silly, and you know what? We like it that way, even if we might be tempted on occasion to lift the genre up on Shakespearean tragedy and grand pathos.