20 Most Important Blockbusters That Changed Cinema Forever

16. Iron Man

One of the biggest releases of 2014 was Guardians Of The Galaxy. That sentence is deliriously awesome, but also completely ridiculous. How did a D-List comic book manage to capture the world's attention?

The answer is Iron Man. He may be now happy to sit alongside Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne at the big boys table, but before his first movie hit Tony Stark was a nobody. There hadn't been any real examples of a hither-to unknown superhero working on the big screen and with the larger franchises starting to fatigue the question of how the superhero genre would continue was beginning to press. With the smart casting of Robert Downey Jr. and deft balance of realism and humour Jon Favreau's film showed that just because mainstream audiences didn't know of a hero didn't mean they wouldn't go see their movie.

It was inevitable one of D.C. or Marvel would eventually properly stray from their safe properties, but no one expected it to be done to such crowd-pleasing results.