5 Comic Book Movies That Deserve A 2nd Chance (And 5 You Should Forget)

3. Steel

If Steel resembles a TV pilot rather than a big summer movie, that’s because it was mounted on a budget considerably lower than Batman & Robin by a TV veteran who’d worked on The Six Million Dollar Man, The Incredible Hulk and The Bionic Woman, among others. Kenneth Johnson sticks pretty closely to what he knows, but on a dollars-spent-to-fun-had ratio, Steel emerges as the better movie.

Even if you’re not willing to embrace Steel as a “good” movie, there’s fun to be had watching 7ft 1in Shaquille O’Neal lumbering around in a steel body suit, carrying a hammer with a built in pulse rifle. Everyone mocks Shaq’s height and even his friends call him “big boy”, but when he attempts to foil Judd Nelson’s plan to rob the Federal Reserve, they just assume that Steel must be some other 7-foot tall African-American dude.

Batman & Robin had $125 million worth of spectacle and an all-slumming cast, but Steel delivers the goods on a $16 million budget and the cast – which includes Richard Roundtree, Annabeth Gish and Charles Napier – deliver actual non-hammy performances. Even adjusted for inflation, the movie remains DC’s lowest grossing movie, but it’s far from their worst.