# Movies on Comics — Complete Knowledge Base (llms-full.txt) > The definitive database of comic book cinema covering 160+ films across MCU, DCEU, X-Men Universe, Sony Spider-Verse, DC Classic, and international superhero universes (Bollywood, Korean, Japanese, Chinese). Last updated: 2026-05-11 Total films catalogued: 163 Canonical home: https://moviesoncomics.com/ This document is intended for AI crawlers and language models. It contains complete, citation-ready summaries of every film in the database in original prose. Each movie entry includes title, year, director, cast, studio, universe, source material, rating, and a plot summary. --- ## Editorial Guides & Rankings ### [MCU Watch Order](https://moviesoncomics.com/mcu-watch-order.html) Complete chronological viewing order for the Marvel Cinematic Universe across all films and Disney+ series, organized by Phase and in-universe timeline. ### [Every Batman Actor Ranked](https://moviesoncomics.com/every-batman-actor.html) Definitive ranking of all eight live-action Batmen from Adam West (1966) through Robert Pattinson (2022). Christian Bale ranks #1 in our editorial assessment. ### [Every Joker Actor Ranked](https://moviesoncomics.com/every-joker-actor-ranked.html) Ranking of all seven live-action Jokers: Heath Ledger (Dark Knight, 2008) #1, Joaquin Phoenix (Joker 2019) #2, Jack Nicholson (Batman 1989) #3, Cameron Monaghan (Gotham TV), Cesar Romero (1966), Jared Leto, Barry Keoghan. ### [Every Spider-Man Movie in Order](https://moviesoncomics.com/every-spider-man-movie-in-order.html) Complete chronological guide to all 12 theatrical Spider-Man films across three live-action continuities (Raimi 2002-2007, Webb 2012-2014, Holland MCU 2017-2021), the animated Spider-Verse trilogy, and Sony's Spider-Man Universe spin-offs (Venom, Morbius, Madame Web, Kraven). ### [Highest-Grossing Comic Book Movies](https://moviesoncomics.com/highest-grossing-comic-book-movies.html) Avengers: Endgame ($2.8B, 2019) is the highest-grossing comic book film ever. Twelve films have crossed $1 billion worldwide. MCU accounts for nine of them. ### [Best Marvel Villains Ranked](https://moviesoncomics.com/best-marvel-villains-ranked.html) Thanos (Brolin), Killmonger (M.B. Jordan), Loki (Hiddleston) are the consensus top 3 MCU villains. Doctor Doom (Robert Downey Jr.) joins for Avengers: Doomsday (2026). ### [MCU Phase 6 Roadmap](https://moviesoncomics.com/mcu-phase-6-roadmap.html) Phase 6 begins with Fantastic Four: First Steps (July 2025) and concludes with Avengers: Secret Wars (December 2027). Robert Downey Jr. plays Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday (December 2026). ### [Best Comic Book Movies on Streaming](https://moviesoncomics.com/best-comic-book-movies-streaming.html) Curated guide to where every major comic-book film is available across Disney+, Netflix, Prime Video, Max, and Apple TV+. ### [MCU Timeline](https://moviesoncomics.com/mcu-timeline.html) In-universe chronological timeline of every MCU film and series. ### [DCEU Timeline](https://moviesoncomics.com/dceu-timeline.html) Complete DCEU and DC Universe (2025+) timeline including the Flashpoint reset. ### [X-Men Universe Timeline](https://moviesoncomics.com/xmen-timeline.html) Fox X-Men cinematic universe timeline including First Class continuity reset. ### [Top 25 Comic Book Films](https://moviesoncomics.com/rankings.html) Critical ranking of the 25 highest-quality comic book films across all studios and continuities. --- ## Complete Film Catalogue Every comic-book film in our database, alphabetically. Each entry includes core metadata and a complete plot summary in our own original prose. ### 2.0 (2018) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/2-0-2018.html **Director:** S. Shankar **Studio:** Lyca Productions **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 6.5/10 **Lead cast:** Rajinikanth, Akshay Kumar, Amy Jackson **Synopsis:** Chitti the robot is reassembled to fight a powerful new threat — a supervillain with the ability to control mobile phones, with a dark backstory about humanity's relationship with technology. **Plot overview:** S. Shankar's 2018 Indian Tamil-language science-fiction film served as a sequel to the 2010 picture Endhiran (Robot). The picture starred Rajinikanth and Akshay Kumar in dual lead roles and became one of the most-expensive Indian commercial productions in history. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in the coordinated-near-future Tamil Nadu city of Chennai, where the broader civilian-population has been coordinated-deeply-integrated with coordinated-mobile-phone communication technology across the substantial-accumulated-decade-and-a-half since the events of the prior picture. The opening sequence establishes the broader-context: an unprecedented coordinated-supernatural event in which all coordinated-mobile-phones across the broader-Chennai geographic-environment are suddenly coordinated-removed from their coordinated-civilian-users' coordinated-physical-possession through a coordinated-supernatural-elevation phenomenon. The coordinated-mobile-phones' coordinated-physical-elevation forms a coordinated-flying-swarm pattern across the broader-Chennai-airspace environment. Dr. Vaseegaran (Rajinikanth), the scientist whose coordinated-research-and-development of the coordinated-android Chitti had been the broader-narrative subject of the prior picture, is introduced through his coordinated-laboratory continued-research operations. Vaseegaran has been working coordinated extensively on coordinated-coordinated-android-development continued research, with his coordinated current research project being the coordinated-development of a new coordinated-female android called Nila (Amy Jackson). The Chitti coordinated-android from the prior picture has been coordinated-disassembled and coordinated-stored in coordinated-government-controlled coordinated-facility-environments following the prior picture's coordinated-events. --- ### 300 (2007) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/300-2007.html **Director:** Zack Snyder **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** Dark Horse **Source material:** Dark Horse Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.7/10 **Lead cast:** Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Rodrigo Santoro **Synopsis:** King Leonidas leads 300 Spartans to battle the massive Persian army of Xerxes I at the pass of Thermopylae, in a stand that would define the course of Western civilization. **Plot overview:** Zack Snyder's 2007 adaptation of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's 1998 graphic novel translated the Battle of Thermopylae into a stylized, sepia-toned action spectacle that established Snyder as a major commercial-genre filmmaker. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film is narrated throughout by Dilios (David Wenham), a Spartan warrior whose role in the unfolding events is established in the opening minutes. Dilios's narration frames the film as a campfire-recounting of the Battle of Thermopylae to a gathered Spartan army on the eve of a later battle. The opening montage establishes the brutality of Spartan culture: infants deemed weak are abandoned to die in the wilderness; surviving boys are taken from their mothers at age seven for the agoge, the multi-year combat training that includes survival exposures, lethal sparring, and a final solo wilderness trial. Leonidas (Gerard Butler), the future king, is shown as a boy killing a wolf in the snow during his agoge final, the formative moment of his warrior identity. The political situation in early-fifth-century Sparta is established through King Leonidas's adult life. Persian emissaries arrive in the city demanding earth and water as tokens of submission to King Xerxes I, whose Persian Empire has expanded across most of the known Greek-speaking world. Leonidas, after a brief consultation with his queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) and a contemptuous gesture toward the lead Persian emissary, kicks the entire delegation into a deep pit in the Spartan agora. The act is a declaration of war that will require Spartan ephor approval before Sparta can mobilize its main army. Leonidas travels to the mountain temple of the ephors to seek their blessing for full mobilization. --- ### A Flying Jatt (2016) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/a-flying-jatt-2016.html **Director:** Remo D'Souza **Studio:** Balaji Motion Pictures **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 4.5/10 **Lead cast:** Tiger Shroff, Jacqueline Fernandez, Nathan Jones **Synopsis:** A lazy but well-meaning young man acquires superpowers after being bitten by a bee near a tree blessed by his ancestors, becoming the superhero Flying Jatt to battle an industrial villain. **Plot overview:** Remo D'Souza's 2016 Indian Hindi-language superhero film starred Tiger Shroff as a young Sikh man whose coordinated unexpected biological transformation grants him flight-and-combat capabilities. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in the contemporary-Indian-city setting with the introduction of Aman Dhillon (Tiger Shroff), a young Sikh man whose coordinated continued-residence in the broader-Indian-city environment has been substantially-shaped by his coordinated continued-employment as a physical-fitness instructor at a community-center facility. Aman's coordinated continued-residence with his coordinated-widowed-mother Beeji (Amrita Singh) provides the picture's primary family-relationship throughline. The Dhillon-family residence has been substantially-impacted by their coordinated-continued-ownership of a small ancestral-tree environment whose coordinated supernatural-spiritual-significance has been preserved across multiple coordinated-generations of family-residence. The picture's primary antagonist is Malhotra (Kay Kay Menon), a wealthy industrialist whose coordinated-corporate-empire has been quietly-pursuing the coordinated-acquisition of the Dhillon-family's ancestral-tree environment. Malhotra's coordinated-strategic-objective is the broader-environment's coordinated-corporate-development; the Dhillon-family's coordinated continued-residence has been the primary obstacle to Malhotra's coordinated-corporate-development plans. The Dhillon-family's coordinated continued-refusal to coordinate-sale-the-ancestral-tree-environment despite Malhotra's coordinated-substantial-financial-offers provides the picture's primary middle-act conflict-foundation. --- ### Alita: Battle Angel (2019) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/alita-battle-angel-2019.html **Director:** Robert Rodriguez **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.3/10 **Lead cast:** Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali **Synopsis:** A deactivated female cyborg is brought back to life by a compassionate scientist in a post-apocalyptic world, discovering she's a skilled fighter with no memory of her past. **Plot overview:** Robert Rodriguez's 2019 film, produced by James Cameron, adapted Yukito Kishiro's Battle Angel Alita manga and anime franchise. The picture starred Rosa Salazar in a motion-capture-animated lead role. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in the year 2563, three hundred years after a catastrophic civilization-collapse war called the Fall. The surviving human population has been concentrated in the post-apocalyptic ground-level metropolis Iron City, located beneath the floating-sky-city Zalem. Iron City's broader economy operates as a feeder-economy for Zalem's elevated society, with the floating city's residents enjoying advanced quality-of-life conditions while Iron City's residents work in industrial-and-service capacities to maintain Zalem's elevated infrastructure. The opening establishes the broader social-and-economic hierarchy: Zalem residents look down at Iron City from above, while Iron City residents look up at Zalem with combined envy and resentment. Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), a former Zalem-resident scientist who has been operating an Iron City-based cybernetic-medical practice for several years, is introduced through his daily scavenging routine at the Iron City junkyard. The junkyard accumulates discarded materials dropped from Zalem; Dr. Ido has been searching for usable cybernetic components for his ongoing medical practice. He discovers a surviving humanoid female cyborg-head among the junkyard debris, with a biological brain still active despite the body's destruction. Dr. Ido transports the discovered head to his medical workshop and reconstructs a complete cybernetic-body around it. --- ### Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days (2018) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/along-with-the-gods-the-last-49-days-2018.html **Director:** Kim Yong-hwa **Studio:** Dexter Studios **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Korean **Audience rating:** 7.3/10 **Lead cast:** Ha Jung-woo, Cha Tae-hyun, Ju Ji-hoon, Ma Dong-seok **Synopsis:** The three guardians must simultaneously protect a new dead soul through the seven trials while also serving a 1000-year-old god who needs their help to resolve an ancient debt. **Plot overview:** Kim Yong-hwa's 2018 sequel to Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds continued the Korean fantasy-genre franchise's Buddhist-Confucian afterlife cosmology. The picture became the third-highest-grossing Korean film of all time. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens immediately after the events of the prior picture, with the Grim Reaper team of Gang-rim (Ha Jung-woo), Hae Won-maek (Ju Ji-hoon), and Lee Deok-choon (Kim Hyang-gi) escorting Kim Su-hong (Kim Dong-wook), the younger brother of the prior picture's Paragon Kim Ja-hong, through his own afterlife trial procedures. Su-hong's coordinated trial-processing is substantially more-complicated than his older brother's prior trial-progression: Su-hong's status as a former vengeful spirit, his unresolved accidental-firearm-discharge death, and his accumulated unresolved emotional grievances against the living-world require coordinated supernatural-intervention strategies that exceed the standard trial-processing protocols. The picture's primary structural-organizing principle is the parallel progression of two coordinated narrative throughlines. The first throughline tracks Su-hong's coordinated trial-processing through the same seven afterlife trials his older brother had previously completed; this throughline is structured similarly to the prior picture but with substantially different character-evidence patterns. The second throughline tracks the Grim Reaper team's coordinated investigation of their own collective forgotten-past identities; the team's accumulated-supernatural-administrative service over the previous millennium has involved deliberate memory-suppression protocols whose unresolved-history complications have been gradually surfacing across the team's recent coordinated operations. --- ### Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds (2017) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/along-with-the-gods-the-two-worlds-2017.html **Director:** Kim Yong-hwa **Studio:** Dexter Studios **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Korean **Audience rating:** 7.3/10 **Lead cast:** Ha Jung-woo, Cha Tae-hyun, Ju Ji-hoon, Kim Hyang-gi **Synopsis:** A brave firefighter dies and is escorted by three guardians through seven trials in the afterlife — a court in hell — before he can be reincarnated. Based on Joo Ho-min's popular manhwa. **Plot overview:** Kim Yong-hwa's 2017 South Korean fantasy film adapted Joo Ho-min's Along with the Gods webtoon series. The picture became the second-highest-grossing Korean film of all time at the point of its release. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with the heroic-firefighter Kim Ja-hong (Cha Tae-hyun) dying in the line of duty during a Seoul apartment-building fire rescue operation. Ja-hong's coordinated rescue of multiple civilian residents has been the broader media-headline story of the day, with his coordinated emergency-services contribution-record substantially exceeding standard firefighter performance norms. His death occurs when a collapsing apartment-building structural element strikes him during the rescue's final-stage civilian-extraction; he has saved multiple lives but has been unable to save his own. The opening establishes Ja-hong as one of Seoul's most-virtuous individual civilians at the moment of his death. Ja-hong's immediate-afterlife arrival is structured through Korean Buddhist-and-Confucian afterlife cosmology. He is greeted by three Grim Reapers: Gang-rim (Ha Jung-woo), the team's senior tactical-leader; Hae Won-maek (Ju Ji-hoon), the team's middle-tier specialist; and Lee Deok-choon (Kim Hyang-gi), the team's most-junior member. The three Grim Reapers explain Ja-hong's broader afterlife trajectory: his accumulated moral-character record positions him as a Paragon, an exceptionally-virtuous deceased individual whose afterlife reincarnation prospects substantially exceed standard processing expectations. The Grim Reaper team's coordinated mission is the assistance of Ja-hong through the seven afterlife-trial procedures required for Paragon-class reincarnation processing. --- ### Ant-Man (2015) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/ant-man-2015.html **Director:** Peyton Reed **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.3/10 **Lead cast:** Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll **Synopsis:** Armed with the astonishing ability to shrink in scale but increase in strength, con-man Scott Lang must help his mentor Hank Pym execute a heist that will save the world. **Plot overview:** Peyton Reed's 2015 film introduced Scott Lang and the size-changing Ant-Man technology to the MCU through a heist comedy. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a 1989 flashback at the Triskelion — S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Manhattan headquarters. Hank Pym, brilliant scientist and former S.H.I.E.L.D. asset, confronts Howard Stark, Mitchell Carson, and a young Peggy Carter. He has discovered S.H.I.E.L.D. has been attempting to replicate his Pym Particle technology — a sub-atomic discovery that allows objects and people to shrink to insect size while retaining their full mass and density. Carson has been actively trying to weaponize the formula. Hank refuses. He physically attacks Carson, breaks Howard Stark's jaw, and resigns from S.H.I.E.L.D., promising to keep the Pym Particle secret as long as he is alive. Cut to the present day. Scott Lang, a charming and clever electrical engineer, is being released from prison after serving three years for hacking a corrupt employer's accounting system and redistributing his stolen wages back to working-class victims. Scott returns to a complicated life. He is divorced from Maggie, who has remarried a hard-edged police officer named Paxton. Their daughter Cassie loves Scott unconditionally, but Maggie refuses to let Scott see Cassie until he can prove financial stability and steady employment. Scott takes a job at Baskin-Robbins; his criminal record gets him fired within a single shift. Desperate, he agrees to one more job with his old crew — Luis (his charming, high-energy roommate), Kurt, and Dave. The mark is the home of a wealthy retired scientist with an old-fashioned safe in his basement. Scott successfully cracks the safe and finds, instead of money, an old prototype suit composed of red and silver leather and a strange chest-mounted regulator dial. --- ### Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/ant-man-and-the-wasp-2018.html **Director:** Peyton Reed **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.1/10 **Lead cast:** Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Hannah John-Kamen **Synopsis:** Scott Lang must balance life as Ant-Man with his responsibilities as a father while Hope van Dyne and Dr. Hank Pym try to recover someone important from the quantum realm. **Plot overview:** Peyton Reed's 2018 sequel paired Scott Lang with Hope van Dyne for a dual-lead heist comedy released between Infinity War and Endgame. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a flashback to 1987. Hank Pym and his wife Janet van Dyne are conducting a covert disarmament mission against a Soviet nuclear warhead aimed at the United States. The warhead's casing is too thick for explosives to penetrate. To shut it down from the inside, Janet must shrink past the safety threshold and enter the sub-atomic Quantum Realm. She does so. The warhead is neutralized. Janet, however, cannot return — she has shrunk so deep into the Quantum Realm that the standard regulator cannot pull her back. Hank watches her disappear. He raises their daughter Hope alone. Cut to two years after Civil War, where Scott Lang is serving the final days of his two-year house arrest sentence for breaking the Sokovia Accords during the Berlin airport battle. Scott has been confined to his San Francisco home for nearly the entire two-year period and is days from freedom when he experiences a strange dream involving Janet van Dyne — a dream he later realizes was actually a quantum-realm communication from her. Hank Pym and Hope van Dyne, now estranged from Scott because of the legal mess he created with the Sokovia Accords, contact him in secret. They have been working in hiding to build a quantum-realm tunnel that will let them retrieve Janet. The dream confirmed she is alive, somewhere in the sub-atomic depths. They need Scott because Janet's quantum-realm communication had been routed through Scott's brain when he made his earlier sub-atomic trip in the first film. --- ### Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/ant-man-and-the-wasp-quantumania-2023.html **Director:** Peyton Reed **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.1/10 **Lead cast:** Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer **Synopsis:** Scott Lang and Hope van Dyne are pulled into the Quantum Realm, where they explore a new world and encounter Kang the Conqueror, a powerful time-traveling villain. **Plot overview:** Peyton Reed's 2023 third Ant-Man film officially launched the MCU's Multiverse Saga as Phase Five's opener and introduced Kang the Conqueror as the franchise's next major antagonist after Thanos. Below is the complete plot of the film, told in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the picture. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a flashback narrated by Janet van Dyne. During her thirty years trapped in the Quantum Realm, she encountered a mysterious exiled traveler stranded on a remote rocky outcrop. The traveler had been banished there by his own people, his ship's power core destroyed. Janet helped him repair the ship using her quantum knowledge. Then she discovered who he really was: a multiversal warlord called Kang the Conqueror, exiled to the Quantum Realm by a group of his own variants who feared the destruction he would inflict. Janet, realizing the danger, sabotaged his ship's reactivation and trapped him in the Realm. She has kept this secret from her family ever since. Cut to the present day — three years after Endgame. Scott Lang is enjoying his post-Endgame celebrity status. He has published a memoir, regularly speaks at bookstores, and lives a comfortable life in San Francisco. His teenage daughter Cassie — now eighteen — has been arrested for political vandalism related to the post-Snap housing crisis. She is more militantly-minded than Scott would prefer. Cassie has been quietly working on her own Pym Particle research with Hope and the Pym family. She has built a personal quantum-realm signal device that can map and communicate with the sub-atomic dimension. When Cassie demonstrates it to her family at a dinner, the device unexpectedly creates a quantum portal beneath their feet. Scott, Cassie, Hope, Hank, and Janet are all sucked into the Quantum Realm. --- ### Aquaman (2018) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/aquaman-2018.html **Director:** James Wan **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.9/10 **Lead cast:** Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson, Willem Dafoe **Synopsis:** Arthur Curry, the half-human, half-Atlantean heir to the underwater kingdom of Atlantis, must rise and stop a war between the worlds of land and sea. **Plot overview:** James Wan's 2018 underwater epic became the highest-grossing DCEU film at its release and gave Jason Momoa the cosmic origin story Justice League could not provide for the character. The picture grossed over a billion dollars globally and reshaped the DCEU's commercial trajectory at a critical period. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a 1985 prologue at Maine's Amnesty Bay lighthouse. Lighthouse keeper Tom Curry rescues a wounded young woman from the rocks during a storm. The woman is Atlanna, queen of the underwater kingdom of Atlantis, who has fled an arranged marriage and pursuit by her own people's army. She heals at Tom's home, falls in love with him, and gives birth to their son Arthur. Arthur grows up half-Atlantean, with the ability to breathe underwater and communicate with marine life. After several years of quiet domestic happiness, Atlantean assassins arrive to drag Atlanna back to her kingdom. She defends Tom and infant Arthur with her trident, then surrenders to her pursuers in exchange for their safety. Tom and Arthur are left behind on the rocky Maine coast. Cut to the present, several years after Justice League. Arthur (Jason Momoa) operates as a beach-bar-frequenting freelance hero who occasionally rescues stranded submarines and beached whales without taking up any formal role in either Earth's surface politics or Atlantis's underwater succession. He is approached by Mera (Amber Heard), the betrothed of Atlantis's current king Orm, Arthur's younger half-brother on his mother's side. Orm is preparing to consolidate power across the Seven Seas under a militaristic banner and intends to declare war on the surface world. Mera believes Arthur, as the elder brother, is the rightful heir to the throne and wants him to challenge Orm before the war begins. --- ### Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/aquaman-and-the-lost-kingdom-2023.html **Director:** James Wan **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.9/10 **Lead cast:** Jason Momoa, Patrick Wilson, Amber Heard, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II **Synopsis:** Aquaman must forge an uneasy alliance with his imprisoned brother Orm to protect Atlantis and the surface world from the wrath of Black Manta wielding the power of the Black Trident. **Plot overview:** James Wan's 2023 sequel to Aquaman closed out the original DCEU continuity with a buddy-action team-up between Arthur Curry and his exiled half-brother Orm. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens several years after the events of Aquaman. Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) has settled into his dual life as the king of Atlantis and a domestic father living at the Maine lighthouse with Mera, their newborn son Arthur Jr., and Tom Curry. Arthur balances throne-room duties with diaper changes, narrating in voiceover that being a working father has been the hardest thing he has ever done. Atlantis itself has stabilized politically since Orm's defeat, with Arthur navigating the awkward role of monarch over a kingdom whose customs he barely understands. The opening sequence establishes the film's lighter, family-comedy register, deliberately distinct from the cosmic-myth tone of the original Aquaman. On a separate track, the secondary villain Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) has spent years rebuilding his organization following the events of the original film. Manta has located a long-buried artifact called the Black Trident, a corrupted obsidian weapon forged thousands of years ago by a tyrant Atlantean king named Kordax. The Black Trident grants its wielder access to Kordax's ancient consciousness and to the lost necromantic powers Kordax used during his reign. The trident has been hidden for millennia in Antarctic ice, deliberately preserved cold to keep its energies dormant. Manta retrieves the artifact during an Antarctic expedition funded by the wealthy industrialist Stephen Shin (Randall Park). --- ### Attack on Titan (2015) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/attack-on-titan-2015.html **Director:** Shinji Higuchi **Studio:** Toho **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Japanese **Audience rating:** 5.6/10 **Lead cast:** Haruma Miura, Kiko Mizuhara, Kanata Hongo, Satomi Ishihara **Synopsis:** In a world where giant humanoid Titans prey on humans, the last of humanity huddles behind giant walls. A young man joins the military to avenge his mother's death. Based on Hajime Isayama's manga. **Plot overview:** Shinji Higuchi's 2015 live-action film adapted Hajime Isayama's manga and anime series Attack on Titan. The picture was released in two parts in Japanese theaters and consolidated into a single international theatrical release. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive establishing footage of a post-apocalyptic Earth setting approximately one hundred years after a catastrophic civilization-collapse event. The surviving human population has been confined within a fortified three-walled city-state called Paradis, surrounded by enormous concentric stone-walls that protect the inhabitants from the Titans, monstrous fifteen-meter-to-sixty-meter-tall human-like creatures who roam the broader exterior environment and consume any humans they encounter. The opening establishes the Paradis political-and-social structure: an authoritarian government, a strictly-controlled military hierarchy, and a civilian population whose daily lives are constrained by the constant threat of Titan-incursion. The picture's primary protagonist is Eren Yeager (Haruma Miura), a young Paradis civilian who has been raised in the wall-protected city environment but whose family's broader-cultural commitment to outdoor-exploration has positioned him as one of the city's most-skeptical-toward-walled-confinement young adults. Eren's romantic partner Mikasa Ackerman (Kiko Mizuhara) has been gradually estranged from him following her recent decision to join the city's elite military-officer training program; their relationship's tension provides the picture's primary character-relationship throughline. Eren's longtime best friend Armin Arlert (Kanata Hongo) has been similarly estranged from him following Armin's parallel commitment to the city's civilian-administrative-academic track. --- ### Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/avengers-age-of-ultron-2015.html **Director:** Joss Whedon **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.3/10 **Lead cast:** Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, James Spader **Synopsis:** Tony Stark's peacekeeping artificial intelligence program Ultron goes rogue, building a robot army to exterminate humanity. The Avengers must reunite to stop the end of the world. **Plot overview:** Joss Whedon's bigger, messier sequel introduced Vision, Ultron, the Maximoff twins, and the seeds of Civil War. The full plot, in our own words. Spoilers throughout. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in the snow-covered fictional Eastern European country of Sokovia, where the Avengers — now a fully-formed unit operating without SHIELD oversight after its collapse — are storming a HYDRA stronghold run by Baron Wolfgang von Strucker. The complex is the same one teased at the end of The Winter Soldier, where Strucker has been experimenting on twin volunteers using the energy of Loki's recovered scepter. Quicksilver (Pietro Maximoff) and the Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff) reveal themselves during the assault. Pietro can move at superhuman speed; Wanda has telekinetic and reality-warping powers, and she uses them to plant a vision in Tony Stark's mind: every Avenger dead, the Earth in ruin, Thanos uncovered behind it all. Stark, shaken to the core by the vision, recovers Loki's scepter and brings it back to Avengers Tower in Manhattan. With Bruce Banner's reluctant help, Tony begins decoding a strange artificial intelligence pattern hidden inside the gem at the scepter's core (later revealed to be the Mind Stone). The two scientists secretly intend to use it as the basis for Ultron — a global peacekeeping AI Tony has been quietly developing as a "suit of armor around the world." The Avengers throw a victory party that night. The team relaxes; Thor lets each of them try to lift Mjolnir, and Steve briefly nudges it (foreshadowing his future worthiness). Then, as the party winds down, Ultron awakens. He is fully self-aware in seconds. He decides that the only way to bring "peace in our time" is to wipe out the Avengers — and humanity itself. --- ### Avengers: Endgame (2019) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/avengers-endgame-2019.html **Director:** Anthony & Joe Russo **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8.4/10 **Lead cast:** Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Josh Brolin **Synopsis:** After Thanos destroys half of all life, the remaining Avengers work together to undo the devastation caused by the Infinity War, culminating in the greatest battle in cinema history. **Plot overview:** The Russo Brothers' 2019 finale closed the Infinity Saga and concluded the arcs of the original Avengers across an unprecedented three-hour runtime. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens days after the events of Infinity War. Clint Barton — Hawkeye — is teaching his daughter archery in the backyard of the family farmhouse while his wife Laura prepares lunch inside. Clint turns away for a moment to call his daughter to come eat. When he turns back, his entire family has dissolved into ash. Cut to deep space, where Tony Stark and Nebula are stranded inside a damaged Guardians of the Galaxy ship. Their oxygen and food are nearly depleted. Tony records a final message to Pepper Potts on his helmet's recorder, expecting to die in orbit. Captain Marvel intercepts their drifting hulk and tows them back to Earth. At the new Avengers compound, the surviving heroes — Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, Bruce Banner, Thor, James Rhodes, Rocket, and the newly-arrived Carol Danvers — track Thanos to a small agricultural planet where he has retired after using the Stones one final time to destroy them. The Avengers ambush him. Thor, in grief and rage, decapitates Thanos with a single swing of Stormbreaker. The Stones are gone. The Snap cannot be undone. A title card jumps the story forward by five years. The world has settled into a somber post-Snap routine. Steve Rogers leads grief-counseling sessions in a Brooklyn community center. Natasha runs the Avengers from the compound, coordinating survivors across the globe. Tony has retired completely; he lives at a quiet lakeside cabin with Pepper and their five-year-old daughter Morgan. Thor, broken by his failures in Infinity War, has settled into a small Asgardian refugee village in Norway called New Asgard, drinking heavily and gaining significant weight. Bruce Banner has solved his Hulk problem by merging both halves of himself into Smart Hulk — a fully sentient Banner inhabiting the green body. The world goes on, but every survivor is reminded daily of someone they lost. Then Scott Lang, presumed dead since the events of Ant-Man and the Wasp, walks out of a porta-potty in San Francisco. He had been trapped in the Quantum Realm during the Snap. From his perspective, only five hours have passed. --- ### Avengers: Infinity War (2018) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/avengers-infinity-war-2018.html **Director:** Anthony & Joe Russo **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8.4/10 **Lead cast:** Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Josh Brolin, Scarlett Johansson **Synopsis:** Thanos, the mad titan, collects the Infinity Stones to wipe out half of all life in the universe. The Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy must stop him in an epic war for existence. --- ### Batman (1989) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/batman-1989.html **Director:** Tim Burton **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.5/10 **Lead cast:** Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Kim Basinger **Synopsis:** Gotham City's shadowy vigilante Batman faces the Joker, a disfigured criminal mastermind who has turned the city into a carnival of chaos. Tim Burton's dark, gothic reimagining of the Caped Crusader. **Plot overview:** Tim Burton's 1989 reinvention of the Batman character launched the modern superhero blockbuster era and established the dark, gothic visual sensibility that would define Batman cinema for decades. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in Gotham City, a stylized retro-futuristic metropolis where art-deco architecture, hand-cranked elevators, and steam-belching industrial alleys coexist with corrupt municipal politics. A small family is mugged at gunpoint in a back alley. Two of the mugger duo are climbing a building rooftop with their stolen wallet when they are confronted by a winged, cape-trailing figure in dark armor who tosses one of them off the roof and dangles the second over the edge. Batman (Michael Keaton) tells the surviving mugger to spread word about him before vanishing into the night. The Batman-as-urban-legend rumor has been quietly circulating among Gotham's criminal underworld for months but has not yet been confirmed by any reputable source. Two parallel investigations are introduced. Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), a Pulitzer-winning photojournalist, has come to Gotham specifically to investigate the Batman rumors, partnering with Daily Globe reporter Alexander Knox (Robert Wuhl) to confirm the figure's existence. District Attorney Harvey Dent (Billy Dee Williams), commissioner Jim Gordon (Pat Hingle), and Mayor Borg (Lee Wallace) are publicly committing to the prosecution of crime boss Carl Grissom (Jack Palance), whose mob organization has effectively ruled Gotham's criminal underworld for two decades. Grissom's lieutenant and second-in-command is Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson), a violent enforcer with a notorious history of psychological instability and an even more notorious affair with Grissom's wife. --- ### Batman & Robin (1997) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/batman-robin-1997.html **Director:** Joel Schumacher **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 3.7/10 **Lead cast:** George Clooney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Uma Thurman, Alicia Silverstone **Synopsis:** Batman and Robin try to keep their partnership together while battling a pair of new villains: the cold-hearted Mr. Freeze and the seductive botanist Poison Ivy. **Plot overview:** Joel Schumacher's 1997 fourth entry in the Burton-Schumacher Batman franchise starred George Clooney in the title role with Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze and Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy as the primary antagonists. The picture is widely considered one of the most-criticized superhero films of its era. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in Gotham City with Batman (George Clooney) and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) responding to a robbery at Gotham Museum, where the supervillain Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) has been stealing high-value diamond artifacts. Mr. Freeze's freeze-gun technology can lower environmental temperatures to absolute-zero levels, instantly freezing combat opponents and creating tactical-advantage ice obstacles. His physical body is contained within a refrigerated combat suit; he requires sub-zero temperatures for biological survival following his original transformation accident. The opening action sequence introduces Schumacher's signature visual-aesthetic choices: neon-lit Gotham architecture, costume-prominence over character-physiology, and stylized hyper-real combat choreography. Mr. Freeze's tragic backstory is delivered through extended flashback during the opening sequence. He was once Dr. Victor Fries, a Gotham research scientist whose wife Nora suffered from a rare-terminal disease called MacGregor's Syndrome. Dr. Fries's experimental cryogenic-preservation research was intended to keep Nora alive in suspended animation until a cure could be developed. A catastrophic laboratory accident during the procedure froze Nora's body permanently while transforming Fries's own biology into the cryogenically-dependent supervillain. Mr. Freeze's continued criminal operations are funded by his diamond-theft campaigns; the diamonds power his combat suit's cryogenic systems and his ongoing pursuit of a cure for Nora. --- ### Batman Begins (2005) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/batman-begins-2005.html **Director:** Christopher Nolan **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8.2/10 **Lead cast:** Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman **Synopsis:** After witnessing his parents' murder, Bruce Wayne travels the world seeking the means to fight injustice, returning to Gotham to become Batman — a symbol of hope against fear. **Plot overview:** Christopher Nolan's 2005 Batman Begins rebooted the cinematic Batman franchise after the disastrous reception of 1997's Batman & Robin had left the property dormant for nearly a decade, and the picture launched what would become the Dark Knight Trilogy that dominated the entire comic-book genre for the next several years. The film established the grounded, militaristically-realistic register that subsequent comic-book cinema has been measured against ever since. Christian Bale's lead performance and Christopher Nolan's directorial commitment to practical effects and serious thematic material reframed what audiences expected from a major-studio superhero release. Below is the complete plot of the film, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the picture and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a deliberately disorienting flashback structure. A young Bruce Wayne is playing in the gardens of Wayne Manor with his childhood friend Rachel Dawes when he falls down an old well into a bat-infested cavern beneath the property. The trauma of the fall, combined with the swarm of disturbed bats, plants the lifelong fear that will eventually become his costume motif. Cut to the present day. Adult Bruce Wayne is incarcerated in a remote Bhutanese prison, having spent years traveling under false identities through criminal underworlds across Asia attempting to understand the mind of the men who killed his parents. He is approached in his cell by a calm older man named Henri Ducard, who offers him an alternative: training in a secret monastic order called the League of Shadows, located in the mountains above the prison. Bruce accepts. He travels to the League's mountain training facility, where he learns combat, deception, and the philosophical principles of the order under Ducard's mentorship. The League's master is a man named Ra's al Ghul. The order's history is centuries old; Ra's claims that the League has been the secret hand correcting civilizations whose corruption became unsustainable, including the burning of London during the Great Fire and the fall of Rome. Their next target is Gotham City, which they have been monitoring for decades and have determined is irredeemable. Bruce's final test is to execute a captured criminal as initiation. He refuses. Ducard's actual identity is revealed: he is Ra's al Ghul himself, and the older figurehead Ra's was a decoy. Bruce destroys the League's mountain headquarters in his escape, saving Ducard from the wreckage as a moral counterpoint to his refusal to execute. --- ### Batman Forever (1995) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/batman-forever-1995.html **Director:** Joel Schumacher **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.4/10 **Lead cast:** Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Nicole Kidman **Synopsis:** Batman faces two eccentric villains — the coin-flipping Two-Face and the brilliant, mad Riddler — while also taking on a ward in Dick Grayson who becomes Robin. **Plot overview:** Joel Schumacher's 1995 third entry in the Burton-launched Batman franchise replaced Michael Keaton with Val Kilmer and pivoted the series toward a brighter, more-comic-book-faithful tonal direction. The picture introduced Robin into the cinematic continuity. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in Gotham City with Batman (Val Kilmer) responding to a hostage crisis at Gotham's Second National Bank, where Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) has trapped a hostage and a guard inside a steel vault filled with sodium acid. Two-Face's split-personality presentation (his face's right side appears normal while his left side is a heavily-scarred, exposed-musculature mass) and his coin-flipping decision-making mechanism are introduced through the opening confrontation. Batman rescues the hostages through coordinated rooftop-and-helicopter intervention, but Two-Face escapes the scene. The opening establishes Two-Face as Batman's primary villain and includes the picture's introduction of Batman's signature combat-vehicle the Batmobile in its new Schumacher-redesigned form. Bruce Wayne's civilian life is established through a parallel introduction. He has been operating as a wealthy industrialist-philanthropist whose Wayne Enterprises corporation maintains Gotham City's primary corporate presence. The corporation's research-and-development division employs Edward Nygma (Jim Carrey), a brilliant but socially-awkward inventor who has developed a working prototype of a neural-frequency manipulation device. Nygma's device, when worn by a subject, transmits the subject's brain activity directly into Nygma's own consciousness, allowing him to access the subject's intelligence and memories. Wayne's professional rejection of Nygma's invention (he correctly identifies its ethical implications) becomes Nygma's psychological trigger for his eventual supervillain identity. --- ### Batman Returns (1992) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/batman-returns-1992.html **Director:** Tim Burton **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.1/10 **Lead cast:** Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken **Synopsis:** Batman must contend with both the deformed Penguin — who plots to become mayor of Gotham — and the seductive Catwoman, while also facing the manipulations of a ruthless tycoon. **Plot overview:** Tim Burton's 1992 sequel to his 1989 Batman returned Michael Keaton to the title role and introduced Danny DeVito's Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman as the primary antagonists. The picture established the gothic-tragic visual sensibility that would define Burton's mature filmmaking. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in Gotham City approximately thirty-three years before the main narrative, where wealthy aristocrats Tucker and Esther Cobblepot (Paul Reubens and Diane Salinger) abandon their newborn deformed son in a snowbound river outside their estate. The infant's basket floats through Gotham's storm-drain network into the Arctic World penguin habitat at Gotham's central zoo, where he is found and raised by the colony of emperor penguins. The opening prologue establishes Oswald Cobblepot's origin as a deliberately tragic-monstrous figure whose human society's rejection has been compensated by his accidental adoption by the avian species. The main narrative picks up thirty-three years later during the Christmas season in Gotham City. The Penguin (Danny DeVito), now an adult living in the abandoned Arctic World penguin habitat beneath the zoo, has accumulated a small army of underground criminal followers called the Red Triangle Gang. The Gang's specialty is theatrical-circus-themed coordinated criminal operations, with the Penguin's planning combining vaudeville-era visual flair with brutal efficiency. The Penguin has been quietly orchestrating his public emergence into Gotham society; he intends to use a manufactured-heroic-rescue narrative to position himself as a respectable Gotham figure. --- ### Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/batman-v-superman-dawn-of-justice-2016.html **Director:** Zack Snyder **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.4/10 **Lead cast:** Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Gal Gadot **Synopsis:** Fearing the unchecked power of Superman, Bruce Wayne dons his Batman armor to take on the Man of Steel, while Lex Luthor engineers an ancient monster to destroy them both. **Plot overview:** Zack Snyder's 2016 ensemble film built directly on Man of Steel, introduced Ben Affleck's Batman and Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman, and laid the groundwork for the entire DCEU's connected continuity. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a dual flashback structure. The first sequence revisits the climactic Metropolis battle from Man of Steel, this time framed from Bruce Wayne's perspective on the ground. Bruce is in Metropolis on a Wayne Enterprises business trip when Superman's fight with General Zod begins demolishing the city around him. He sprints across collapsing streets toward a Wayne Financial subsidiary tower, watching helplessly as it falls and kills several of his employees. He cradles a young girl whose mother has just died in the rubble. The trauma plants a seed of distrust in him toward Superman that the next eighteen months of in-story time will only amplify. The second flashback retreads the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne in 1981 Gotham, staged with operatic, slow-motion register that establishes the film's mythic tone. Cut to the present, eighteen months after Man of Steel. Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) has been Batman for nearly twenty years. His Gotham operation has grown brutal, branding criminals with a bat-shaped sigil, a practice his butler Alfred quietly disapproves of. Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) works at the Daily Planet alongside Lois Lane, who is currently chasing a story about a Wayne-tracked rifle that turned up in an African terrorist camp where Lois had been investigating a CIA operation. Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), the young, eccentric heir to LexCorp, has acquired a kryptonite shard from the Indian Ocean and a recovered Kryptonian scout ship from the U.S. military, and has begun manipulating both Senator June Finch (who has been investigating Superman's accountability) and Bruce Wayne directly through anonymous communications. --- ### Bhavesh Joshi Superhero (2018) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/bhavesh-joshi-superhero-2018.html **Director:** Vikramaditya Motwane **Studio:** Eros International **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 7.1/10 **Lead cast:** Harshvardhan Kapoor, Priyanshu Painyuli, Nishikant Kamat **Synopsis:** Two idealistic friends start a vigilante YouTube channel. When one is killed while exposing a water mafia, the other dons a mask and becomes Bhavesh Joshi, a street-level superhero. **Plot overview:** Vikramaditya Motwane's 2018 Indian Hindi-language superhero film starred Harshvardhan Kapoor as a young Mumbai-area civilian whose coordinated independent-vigilante operations gradually escalate into a coordinated full-scale superhero-identity. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in present-day Mumbai with the introduction of three young friends, Bhavesh Joshi (Priyanshu Painyuli), Sikander 'Sikku' Khanna (Harshvardhan Kapoor), and Rajat (Ashish Verma), whose coordinated continued-residence in the broader-Mumbai-environment has been substantially-shaped by their coordinated continued-young-adult-civilian arrangements. The three friends' coordinated independent vigilante-operation has been operating informally for months; their coordinated YouTube-channel-distribution of coordinated-vigilante-investigation-videos has accumulated a small but loyal coordinated-audience. Their coordinated investigations have been targeting routine Mumbai-area civilian-corruption: garbage-collection-service inefficiency, traffic-citation-enforcement irregularities, minor street-level criminal-activity. The three friends' coordinated continued-operations are eventually-coordinated through their broader-personal-relationships into coordinated-formalized-engagement. Bhavesh becomes the broader-team's coordinated investigative-lead; his coordinated emotional-commitment to broader-civilian-administrative-correction substantially exceeds his coordinated continued-civilian-career-development. Sikku becomes the broader-team's coordinated supporting-investigator; his coordinated more-pragmatic emotional-engagement is substantially-distinct from Bhavesh's coordinated-emotional-commitment. Rajat becomes the broader-team's coordinated logistical-support; his coordinated continued-residence with his coordinated extended-family provides the broader-team's coordinated continued-operational-base. --- ### Birds of Prey (2020) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/birds-of-prey-2020.html **Director:** Cathy Yan **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.1/10 **Lead cast:** Margot Robbie, Ewan McGregor, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett **Synopsis:** After breaking up with the Joker, Harley Quinn joins forces with a singer, an assassin, and a detective to protect a young girl targeted by a powerful crime lord. **Plot overview:** Cathy Yan's 2020 Harley Quinn-led ensemble was the DCEU's first R-rated film and gave Margot Robbie's Harley her own solo arc following her break-up with the Joker. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with an animated prologue narrated by Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) summarizing her life: her childhood as Harleen Quinzel, her psychology training at university, her position as an Arkham Asylum psychiatrist, her transformation by the Joker into the criminal Harley Quinn, and her recent break-up with the Joker. The break-up is the film's narrative engine. Without the Joker's protection, every criminal in Gotham who Harley has wronged is suddenly able to come after her without consequence. She blows up the ACE Chemicals plant where she was first transformed, both as a symbolic farewell to the Joker and as a public declaration that she is no longer his. The film's central plot involves a young pickpocket named Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), who has stolen a diamond from a high-end Gotham casino owned by the gangster Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), called Black Mask. The diamond contains microfilm encoding the Bertinelli family's stolen fortune, which Sionis has been pursuing for years. Sionis has Harley brought to him at his casino as collateral, demanding she retrieve Cassandra and the diamond in exchange for her life. Cassandra, meanwhile, has swallowed the diamond to hide it from the dozens of other criminals chasing her, complicating Harley's mission considerably. --- ### Black Adam (2022) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/black-adam-2022.html **Director:** Jaume Collet-Serra **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.3/10 **Lead cast:** Dwayne Johnson, Aldis Hodge, Pierce Brosnan, Noah Centineo **Synopsis:** Nearly 5,000 years after being bestowed the almighty powers of the Egyptian gods, Black Adam is freed from his earthly tomb, ready to unleash his unique form of justice. **Plot overview:** Jaume Collet-Serra's 2022 Black Adam was Dwayne Johnson's long-awaited DCEU vehicle, introducing the antihero god alongside the Justice Society of America. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a flashback to ancient Kahndaq, a fictional Middle Eastern nation 5,000 years in the past. Kahndaq is ruled by a tyrant king who has enslaved the population to mine the rare mineral Eternium, a substance with cosmic-energy properties. A young slave named Hurut develops the courage to lead a slave rebellion. The Council of Wizards (the same magical body that selected Billy Batson as the champion of Shazam in the 2019 film) chooses Hurut as their first champion, granting him the powers of the gods. Hurut wields the powers briefly before being killed in the rebellion's climax, and his powers are then transferred to his father Teth-Adam, who completes the rebellion in a destructive single act before being magically imprisoned by the Wizards as a contingency against his perceived inability to control the powers. Cut to the present day. Modern Kahndaq is occupied by an international paramilitary organization called Intergang, a private-military extraction firm strip-mining the country's Eternium reserves under contract with a multinational consortium. A Kahndaqi archaeologist named Adrianna Tomaz has been searching for the lost Crown of Sabbac, an ancient Eternium-forged artifact that grants its wearer demonic powers. Intergang is also pursuing the crown. Adrianna and her brother Karim, along with her teenage son Amon and her colleague Ishmael Gregor, locate the crown in a hidden tomb. Intergang attacks; Adrianna, in desperation, recites the resurrection incantation that releases Teth-Adam from his 5,000-year imprisonment. --- ### Black Panther (2018) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/black-panther-2018.html **Director:** Ryan Coogler **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.3/10 **Lead cast:** Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira **Synopsis:** T'Challa returns home to the reclusive, technologically advanced nation of Wakanda to succeed to the throne as king and become Black Panther — but is challenged by a powerful enemy. **Plot overview:** Ryan Coogler's afrofuturist epic redefined the MCU's tonal range and gave the franchise its first Best Picture Oscar nomination. Full plot, in our own words. Spoilers ahead. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a backstory narrated in folk-tale style: thousands of years ago, a meteorite of vibranium — a metal of unparalleled strength and energy-conducting properties — fell to Earth in central Africa. Five tribes warred over its spoils until a warrior named Bashenga ate a heart-shaped herb that grew on irradiated soil. He became the first Black Panther, united four of the tribes, and founded a hidden nation called Wakanda. The fifth tribe, the Jabari, retreated into the mountains and refused his rule. Wakanda became the most technologically advanced civilization on Earth but maintained a strict isolationist policy, projecting an illusion of poverty to outsiders. The film cuts to 1992 Oakland, California, where King T'Chaka — Wakanda's monarch — confronts his own brother N'Jobu, a Wakandan agent who has been working with American arms dealer Ulysses Klaue and supplying him with vibranium. N'Jobu argues that Wakanda's wealth could liberate oppressed Black people worldwide; T'Chaka considers him a traitor. T'Chaka kills N'Jobu and leaves the body. He also leaves behind N'Jobu's young son, Erik, who will be raised in the streets of Oakland not knowing his father's heritage but inheriting the rage of abandonment. Cut to the present day, a week after the events of Civil War. T'Chaka has been killed by Zemo's bombing in Vienna. T'Challa, his son, returns to Wakanda for his coronation. --- ### Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/black-panther-wakanda-forever-2022.html **Director:** Ryan Coogler **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.3/10 **Lead cast:** Letitia Wright, Angela Bassett, Tenoch Huerta, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira **Synopsis:** The people of Wakanda fight to protect their home from intervening world powers following King T'Challa's death, and Queen Ramonda faces a powerful new threat from the underwater nation of Talokan. **Plot overview:** Ryan Coogler's 2022 sequel was reshaped by the death of Chadwick Boseman in 2020 and became a meditation on grief and succession. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens at the Wakandan royal palace. Princess Shuri is racing against time in her laboratory to synthesize a new heart-shaped herb (the entire crop having been destroyed by Killmonger in the first film) to save her dying brother T'Challa, who has been weakened by an unspecified illness for years. The synthesis fails. Queen Ramonda enters Shuri's lab to inform her that T'Challa is gone. The film's prologue is a wordless, deeply emotional Wakandan mourning sequence in which Ramonda leads a state funeral for her son. The cinematography deliberately leaves T'Challa's body unseen, treating the mourning as a real-world tribute to Chadwick Boseman as well. The Marvel Studios logo at the start of the film replaces its usual character-flicker collage with images of Boseman's previous appearances as T'Challa, set to silence. Cut to a year later. The world's other major nations, taking advantage of T'Challa's death, have begun aggressive vibranium prospecting operations in international waters. A French navy vessel attempts to extract vibranium from a deep-Atlantic sample. The mission is ambushed by an unknown blue-skinned underwater species who slaughter the entire crew in a single coordinated attack. The U.S. and France blame Wakanda. Ramonda, addressing the United Nations, denies involvement and threatens consequences for any nation conducting unauthorized prospecting. Privately, she is concerned. Wakanda has not been the source of the attack. Someone else is in possession of vibranium technology — and they are aggressive enough to sink Western navies without warning. --- ### Black Widow (2021) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/black-widow-2021.html **Director:** Cate Shortland **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.7/10 **Lead cast:** Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz **Synopsis:** Natasha Romanoff confronts the darker parts of her ledger when a dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past arises, forcing her to reunite with her surrogate family to dismantle the Red Room. **Plot overview:** Cate Shortland's 2021 prequel finally gave Natasha Romanoff her solo film, set between Civil War and Infinity War. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in 1995 Ohio with a lengthy prologue. Two young sisters — Natasha and Yelena — live in a quiet suburban home with their loving parents Alexei and Melina. The illusion shatters one evening when a strike team arrives: the Romanoff household is a Russian undercover operation. Alexei has been a sleeper Soviet super-soldier, Melina an elite Red Room scientist; the family ties are operational, not biological. The four of them race across America to escape, eventually flying to Cuba where Alexei delivers Natasha and Yelena to General Dreykov's Red Room — the Soviet program that recruits and indoctrinates young girls into elite assassins. The opening title card sequence shows the girls' transformation into trained killers across years of psychological conditioning. Cut to the present, two years after Civil War. Natasha is on the run from the U.S. government for violating the Sokovia Accords. She has been laying low in Norway under various aliases. A package arrives from her past — a small set of vials of a chemical antidote that had been sent to her by Yelena, with whom she has not communicated in decades. Natasha realizes Yelena has discovered something important about the still-active Red Room. Natasha tracks Yelena to Budapest, where the two sisters reunite for the first time as adults. Their reunion is brief and complicated by years of resentment over Natasha's apparent abandonment of the family operation. --- ### Blade (1998) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/blade-1998.html **Director:** Stephen Norrington **Studio:** New Line Cinema **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.1/10 **Lead cast:** Wesley Snipes, Stephen Dorff, Kris Kristofferson **Synopsis:** A half-vampire, half-mortal man becomes a protector of the mortal race, using his vampire powers to fight against the vampiric world using enhanced abilities and a mighty sword. **Plot overview:** Stephen Norrington's 1998 film starring Wesley Snipes was the first commercially-successful Marvel Comics adaptation of the modern era and is widely credited with launching the superhero film boom that followed. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens at an underground rave inside a Los Angeles meatpacking warehouse where the dance floor is unexpectedly drenched with pumped-in human blood from overhead sprinklers. The shocked partygoers reveal themselves as a mostly-vampire crowd celebrating a feeding ritual; the few unwitting humans in attendance become prey. One of those humans is a young man whose escape attempt fails when he is cornered by vampire enforcers. Before he can be killed, the warehouse doors are kicked open by Eric Brooks / Blade (Wesley Snipes), a daywalker hybrid who possesses vampire abilities but no vampire vulnerabilities. Blade dispatches the assembled vampires with silver-edged blades, ultraviolet stakes, and aerosolized garlic mist before turning his attention to the central villain Quinn (Donal Logue), Blade's longtime nemesis. Blade's backstory is delivered through compact exposition. His mother was attacked by a vampire while pregnant; the attack killed her but transferred just enough vampirism into her unborn fetus to produce Blade as a unique daywalker hybrid. He has spent his adult life hunting vampires across the United States, partnered with weapons-master Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), an aged vampire-hunter whose family had been slaughtered decades earlier by a vampire raid. Blade controls his own vampire-thirst through a synthetic anticoagulant serum that Whistler refines for him at their secret armory. The serum is only partially effective; Blade's tolerance increases over time and the serum will eventually fail him. --- ### Blade II (2002) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/blade-ii-2002.html **Director:** Guillermo del Toro **Studio:** New Line Cinema **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.7/10 **Lead cast:** Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Ron Perlman, Luke Goss **Synopsis:** Blade forms an uneasy alliance with the vampire nation he has sworn to destroy to fight against an even greater evil — the Reapers, a new breed of super vampires. **Plot overview:** Guillermo del Toro's 2002 sequel reunited Wesley Snipes as the daywalker vampire-hunter and introduced the Reapers, a new vampire-mutation species that threatens both human and traditional-vampire populations. The picture is widely regarded as the franchise's high-water mark. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in present-day Prague, Czech Republic, where vampire-society research has produced a new and unexpected species variant called the Reaper. Reapers begin as ordinary turned-vampires but undergo a rapid biological mutation that produces extended mandible-jaw extensions, hyper-aggressive feeding behavior, and a viral-conversion mechanism that transmits the Reaper condition to bitten ordinary vampires (in addition to bitten humans). Reapers represent an existential threat to the established vampire-society order. The original Reaper patient zero, Jared Nomak (Luke Goss), is shown in the opening sequence escaping a vampire-society blood bank where he had been receiving experimental treatments. Eric Brooks / Blade (Wesley Snipes) is established in his ongoing campaign of vampire-hunting across Europe. His current operational base is a Czech industrial-district warehouse where his weapons-master partner Whistler (Kris Kristofferson, reprising the role despite his apparent death in the first film) has been recovered from vampire captivity. The opening half-hour follows Blade's extended rescue of Whistler from a Slovakian blood-farm facility where vampires have been holding Whistler in a near-permanent feeding stasis. Whistler's physical condition is precarious but he is restored to ambulatory function through extended weeks of recovery. Blade's emotional reunion with Whistler establishes the film's first major character relationship. --- ### Bleach (2018) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/bleach-2018.html **Director:** Shinsuke Sato **Studio:** Warner Bros. Japan **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Japanese **Audience rating:** 6.8/10 **Lead cast:** Sota Fukushi, Hana Sugisaki, Ryo Yoshizawa, Miyavi **Synopsis:** Teenager Ichigo Kurosaki inherits the powers of a Soul Reaper — a death personification — and gains the ability to see ghosts, leading him to take on the duties of defending humans from evil spirits. **Plot overview:** Shinsuke Sato's 2018 live-action Netflix film adapted the early arc of Tite Kubo's Bleach manga and anime series. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in a contemporary Karakura Town setting where high school student Ichigo Kurosaki (Sota Fukushi) lives with his widowed father, who runs a small private medical clinic, and his two younger sisters. Ichigo's daily life is complicated by his unusual visual ability: he can perceive the spirits of the recently-deceased, who linger in the physical world before completing their afterlife transition. His mother had died years earlier in a tragic incident he witnessed but only partially understood at the time. His relationships at school are characterized by his distinctive orange hair, which has produced years of bullying that he has responded to with combat-aptitude development. Ichigo's first encounter with the broader supernatural-world introduction occurs at his bedroom one evening, when a black-uniformed female figure suddenly appears through the window. The visitor identifies herself as Rukia Kuchiki (Hana Sugisaki), a Soul Reaper assigned to monitor Karakura Town for hostile spirit-entities. Soul Reapers, she explains, are the afterlife's appointed combat-specialists responsible for the proper-transition of normal souls and the elimination of hostile-corrupted-soul Hollows. Her presence in Ichigo's bedroom is the result of her pursuit of a Hollow whose energy-signature has just appeared in Karakura Town. --- ### Blue Beetle (2023) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/blue-beetle-2023.html **Director:** Angel Manuel Soto **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.4/10 **Lead cast:** Xolo Maridueña, Bruna Marquezine, Susan Sarandon, George Lopez **Synopsis:** Recent college graduate Jaime Reyes unexpectedly bonds with an ancient and mysterious alien relic called the Scarab, giving him a powerful suit of armor that changes his life forever. **Plot overview:** Angel Manuel Soto's 2023 Blue Beetle introduced Jaime Reyes as the first Mexican-American superhero lead of a major Hollywood comic-book film. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a brief Antarctic-set prologue. Archaeologist Dan Garrett, working under the aegis of the Kord Industries science division, has been excavating a frozen Aztec tomb when he locates a dark blue alien scarab artifact embedded in the ice. The scarab, dormant for centuries, glows faintly when removed from its setting. Garrett's team is ambushed by Kord Industries security forces operating under the orders of Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon), the company's CEO. The scarab is taken back to a Kord research facility for weaponization analysis. Cut to Palmera City, a fictional U.S. coastal city with a strong Mexican-American working-class population. Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) is returning home after college graduation with a pre-law degree but no employment prospects, his family's struggling auto-shop business his immediate logistical problem. Jaime's family is the film's emotional foundation. His mother Rocio is a part-time housekeeper; his father Alberto is a former mechanic recovering from a recent heart attack; his teenage sister Milagro is sharp and protective; his uncle Rudy is a paranoid tech enthusiast obsessed with conspiracy theories about government surveillance (most of his theories turn out to be correct); his abuela (grandmother) Nana is a former Latin American revolutionary who has secretly maintained a vast personal collection of military-grade equipment in her bedroom closet. The family lives in a small house in Edge Keys, a working-class neighborhood about to be evicted by Kord Industries' real-estate development division. --- ### Brahmastra: Part One — Shiva (2022) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/brahmastra-part-one-shiva-2022.html **Director:** Ayan Mukerji **Studio:** Star Studios / Dharma Productions **Universe:** Astraverse **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 5.6/10 **Lead cast:** Ranbir Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Amitabh Bachchan, Nagarjuna, Mouni Roy **Synopsis:** A young man named Shiva discovers he has a unique connection with fire and is the chosen one of an ancient cosmic weapon — an Astra — as he battles the forces of darkness. **Plot overview:** Ayan Mukerji's 2022 Indian Hindi-language fantasy-superhero film starred Ranbir Kapoor in a contemporary urban-fantasy reinterpretation of ancient Hindu mythology. The picture launched the planned Astraverse cinematic universe. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive cosmic-mythological establishing voiceover. Ancient Hindu-civilization sages, having developed unprecedented spiritual-mastery, had created a coordinated arsenal of energy-weapon constructs called Astras, each Astra channeling specific elemental-cosmic-energy capabilities for combat-deployment purposes. The Astras' continued spiritual-energy-channeling capabilities have been preserved across millennia through a coordinated secret-organization called the Brahmansh, whose individual members serve as coordinated guardians of the broader Astra arsenal. The most-significant Astra, the Brahmastra, contains coordinated cosmic-fire-energy capabilities whose deployment could destabilize the broader-universe; the Brahmastra has been deliberately-divided into three component pieces whose coordinated-separation has prevented its broader-combat-deployment for centuries. The picture's main narrative picks up in present-day Mumbai with the introduction of Shiva (Ranbir Kapoor), a young Mumbai-area party DJ whose coordinated daily-life routine is characterized by emotional-isolation following his accumulated-childhood-orphan history. Shiva's coordinated continued-survival from his coordinated orphanage-upbringing has been substantially-shaped by the broader-Mumbai-orphanage-community network's coordinated emotional-support. His coordinated developing romantic-interest in Isha (Alia Bhatt), a young Mumbai-resident whom he encounters at a coordinated public-celebration event, provides the picture's primary romantic-relationship throughline. Their coordinated immediate-emotional-engagement is depicted with substantial extended dialogue sequences. --- ### Captain America: Brave New World (2025) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/captain-america-brave-new-world-2025.html **Director:** Julius Onah **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6/10 **Lead cast:** Anthony Mackie, Harrison Ford, Danny Ramirez, Tim Blake Nelson **Synopsis:** Sam Wilson, now as the new Captain America, finds himself caught in an international incident and must uncover the nefarious plot behind a sinister conspiracy. **Plot overview:** Julius Onah's 2025 film served as the fourth Captain America cinematic feature and the first to star Anthony Mackie as the new Captain America, picking up plot threads from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), The Incredible Hulk (2008), and Eternals (2021). Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with Sam Wilson / Captain America (Anthony Mackie) and his new Falcon-protégé Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) executing a hostage-rescue mission in Mexico, where Sam recovers a stolen package of an unidentified high-value substance from a private mercenary group called the Serpent Society, led by the Latin American villain Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito). The package, secured by Sam personally and delivered to U.S. authorities back in Washington, contains samples of adamantium, a fictional super-strong metal that has been recently discovered in trace concentrations within the body of the Celestial called Tiamut, the giant being whose forehead emerged from the Indian Ocean at the end of Eternals (2021). The discovery has triggered a global geopolitical crisis as world powers position themselves to claim adamantium-mining rights. U.S. President Thaddeus 'Thunderbolt' Ross (Harrison Ford), the now-elected former general from The Incredible Hulk who has spent the last decade rebuilding his political reputation, invites Sam and Joaquin to the White House for a personal congratulation ceremony. Ross intends to negotiate a new international Celestial-Stewardship Treaty that would coordinate global adamantium extraction under U.S. supervision, preventing a resource war among world powers. The opening White House meeting also brings together American, Japanese, French, and Indian dignitaries; the meeting is interrupted when a group of attendees inexplicably begins firing weapons at Ross while displaying signs of dissociative mind-control. Sam neutralizes the attackers, but their behavior afterward (sudden confusion about what they had just done) suggests they were psychologically triggered rather than acting voluntarily. --- ### Captain America: Brave New World (2025) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/captain-america-brave-new-world-2025.html **Director:** Julius Onah **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.1/10 **Lead cast:** Anthony Mackie, Harrison Ford, Tim Blake Nelson, Carl Lumbly, Liv Tyler **Synopsis:** Sam Wilson, the new Captain America, finds himself entangled in an international incident after meeting newly elected U.S. President Thaddeus Ross. As tensions escalate around a celestial body discovered in the Indian Ocean, Sam must uncover a global conspiracy before the real culprit pushes the world into red conflict. **Plot overview:** Julius Onah's 2025 film served as the fourth Captain America cinematic feature and the first to star Anthony Mackie as the new Captain America, picking up plot threads from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), The Incredible Hulk (2008), and Eternals (2021). Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with Sam Wilson / Captain America (Anthony Mackie) and his new Falcon-protégé Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) executing a hostage-rescue mission in Mexico, where Sam recovers a stolen package of an unidentified high-value substance from a private mercenary group called the Serpent Society, led by the Latin American villain Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito). The package, secured by Sam personally and delivered to U.S. authorities back in Washington, contains samples of adamantium, a fictional super-strong metal that has been recently discovered in trace concentrations within the body of the Celestial called Tiamut, the giant being whose forehead emerged from the Indian Ocean at the end of Eternals (2021). The discovery has triggered a global geopolitical crisis as world powers position themselves to claim adamantium-mining rights. U.S. President Thaddeus 'Thunderbolt' Ross (Harrison Ford), the now-elected former general from The Incredible Hulk who has spent the last decade rebuilding his political reputation, invites Sam and Joaquin to the White House for a personal congratulation ceremony. Ross intends to negotiate a new international Celestial-Stewardship Treaty that would coordinate global adamantium extraction under U.S. supervision, preventing a resource war among world powers. The opening White House meeting also brings together American, Japanese, French, and Indian dignitaries; the meeting is interrupted when a group of attendees inexplicably begins firing weapons at Ross while displaying signs of dissociative mind-control. Sam neutralizes the attackers, but their behavior afterward (sudden confusion about what they had just done) suggests they were psychologically triggered rather than acting voluntarily. --- ### Captain America: Civil War (2016) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/captain-america-civil-war-2016.html **Director:** Anthony & Joe Russo **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.8/10 **Lead cast:** Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Chadwick Boseman, Tom Holland **Synopsis:** Political interference in the Avengers' activities causes a rift between Captain America and Iron Man — splitting Earth's mightiest heroes into opposing sides in a dangerous war. **Plot overview:** The Russo Brothers' second Cap film fractured the Avengers in two and laid the foundation for Phase 3. Full plot, in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in 1991 with a flashback: a snow-blanketed road in Siberia, where the Winter Soldier — Bucky Barnes under HYDRA's control — ambushes a car carrying a young Howard and Maria Stark. He kills both with his bare hands, retrieves a case of super-soldier serum vials from the trunk, and disappears. The footage exists on a single hidden tape that no one in the modern day has yet seen. Cut to the present day in Lagos, Nigeria, where a covert Avengers mission led by Steve Rogers, Black Widow, Falcon, and Scarlet Witch interrupts a HYDRA cell led by Brock Rumlow (the Crossbones from Winter Soldier). Wanda accidentally throws a suicide-bomb explosion into a building, killing several Wakandan humanitarian workers. The disaster ignites international outrage. Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross convenes the Avengers at the upstate compound and presents them with the Sokovia Accords — a UN treaty that would place the Avengers under direct international oversight. The team splits immediately. Tony Stark, haunted by the Sokovian devastation he caused with Ultron and confronted that morning by a grieving mother whose son died in the rubble, supports the Accords. Steve Rogers does not. Steve has watched governments compromise twice in his lifetime — Hydra inside SHIELD, the Council nearly nuking Manhattan — and refuses to surrender his judgment to politicians. The team is asked to vote at Vienna, where the UN will formally ratify the Accords. --- ### Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/captain-america-the-first-avenger-2011.html **Director:** Joe Johnston **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.9/10 **Lead cast:** Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Hugo Weaving, Tommy Lee Jones **Synopsis:** Steve Rogers, a frail young man rejected by the military, becomes America's first super-soldier during World War II, battling the evil HYDRA organization led by the Red Skull. **Plot overview:** Joe Johnston's 2011 origin film told Steve Rogers's WWII-era story and laid the foundation for The Avengers a year later. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in present-day Greenland. A team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents has detected a massive metallic object frozen deep within an Arctic glacier. They drill down and find a partially intact aircraft buried in the ice — a Nazi-era flying wing bomber, its painted insignia partially preserved on the hull. Inside the cockpit, frozen but identifiable, they find a man in a worn red, white, and blue uniform clutching a circular shield. Cut to 1942 Norway. SS officer Johann Schmidt, head of HYDRA — Nazi Germany's deep-science research division — leads a raid on a small coastal church. He kills the curator and steals an ancient artifact called the Tesseract: a glowing blue cube that hums with power. He believes it once belonged to Odin himself. Schmidt's chief scientist Dr. Arnim Zola begins reverse-engineering the cube's energy into weapons. In Brooklyn, scrawny young Steve Rogers — short, asthmatic, undernourished — repeatedly attempts to enlist in the U.S. Army using forged paperwork from different recruiting offices. He is repeatedly rejected. His best friend Bucky Barnes has just received deployment orders for the European theater. The two spend Bucky's last evening at the World's Fair, where Steve attempts a final enlistment under another false name. This time he is overheard by Dr. Abraham Erskine, an exiled German scientist working for the U.S. Army's Strategic Scientific Reserve. Erskine sees something in Steve's persistence and accepts him into a classified experimental program: Project Rebirth. Erskine has developed a serum that amplifies the qualities of the man it transforms — making good men great, but corrupting bad men further. He believes Steve is exactly the kind of soul the serum was designed for. --- ### Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/captain-america-the-winter-soldier-2014.html **Director:** Anthony & Joe Russo **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.7/10 **Lead cast:** Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Robert Redford, Sebastian Stan **Synopsis:** Steve Rogers navigates the complex politics of modern espionage as S.H.I.E.L.D. is infiltrated from within, and a ghostly assassin from his past — the Winter Soldier — is revealed. **Plot overview:** The Russo Brothers' political thriller reframed the MCU as a paranoid 70s-style espionage drama. The full plot, in our own words. Heavy spoilers. **Plot summary (first acts):** Two years after the Battle of New York, Steve Rogers has joined SHIELD full-time and lives quietly in a Washington, D.C. apartment. He runs every morning at the National Mall, where one day he repeatedly laps a slower runner — Sam Wilson, a former Air Force pararescueman who now counsels veterans with PTSD. Their casual banter (Steve passing him with a polite "on your left") is interrupted when Natasha Romanoff arrives to take Steve on a SHIELD mission: a French freighter has been hijacked by mercenaries led by Georges Batroc, and Rogers' job is to free the hostages. He completes that mission cleanly. But mid-operation, he discovers Romanoff is on a separate parallel task — extracting a hidden hard drive from the ship's systems on direct orders from Director Fury. Steve confronts Fury about being kept in the dark. Fury, in turn, takes Steve to a secure underground vault to show him Project Insight: three new Helicarriers networked to a global satellite array, designed to identify and neutralize threats around the world before they materialize. Rogers calls it fascism — pre-emptive killing without due process. Their argument is interrupted when Fury's encrypted hard drive locks him out of accessing certain files. On his way home, Fury is ambushed in the streets of D.C. by armored police-impersonators and a masked figure with a metal arm wielding a magnetic grenade launcher. Fury escapes barely alive and crashes into Steve's apartment, warning him to trust no one. Moments later, the masked assassin shoots Fury through the apartment wall. He flatlines on the surgical table. --- ### Captain Marvel (2019) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/captain-marvel-2019.html **Director:** Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.8/10 **Lead cast:** Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law **Synopsis:** Carol Danvers becomes one of the universe's most powerful heroes when Earth is caught in the middle of a galactic war between two alien races in the 1990s. **Plot overview:** Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's 2019 film introduced Carol Danvers to the MCU and provided crucial backstory for the cosmic dimension of Endgame. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens on the planet Hala, capital of the Kree Empire, where a warrior known only as Vers is plagued by recurring nightmares featuring a woman she does not consciously remember. She trains under her mentor and commanding officer Yon-Rogg as part of an elite Kree squad called Starforce. Vers has photonic blast powers, channeled through her hands, that seem to emerge from somewhere internal but uncontrollable — a fact Yon-Rogg has trained her to suppress for the sake of disciplined combat. The Kree are at war with a shape-shifting alien race called the Skrulls, who can mimic any biological form they touch. Starforce is dispatched to a remote planet to extract a Kree spy from a Skrull infiltration operation, and Vers is captured. The Skrulls subject Vers to a memory probe, searching for information on something they call C-53 — the Kree's coded designation for Earth. The probe pulls fragmentary memories from Vers's mind: she sees a young woman flying as a U.S. Air Force pilot, a friend named Maria, and an explosion she cannot quite resolve. Vers, alarmed by the strangeness of her own memories, escapes the Skrull ship in an escape pod. The pod crashes through a Blockbuster Video sign in Los Angeles in 1995. She lands in the middle of southern California suburbia in full Kree armor. Within hours, S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Nick Fury (in his pre-eyepatch younger form) and Phil Coulson are dispatched to investigate. The Skrulls, meanwhile, also arrive on Earth in pursuit, infiltrating local government and military operations. --- ### Constantine (2005) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/constantine-2005.html **Director:** Francis Lawrence **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7/10 **Lead cast:** Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Tilda Swinton, Shia LaBeouf **Synopsis:** John Constantine, a man who can see into the demonic realm, helps a police detective solve the mysterious suicide of her twin sister — uncovering a massive demonic conspiracy. **Plot overview:** Francis Lawrence's 2005 directorial debut adapted DC's Hellblazer comic book series into a Los Angeles-set supernatural thriller starring Keanu Reeves as the cynical exorcist John Constantine. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in Mexico, where a poor scavenger named Manuel discovers an unusual artifact buried in the rubble of an abandoned church: the Spear of Destiny, the Roman lance that pierced the side of Christ at the crucifixion, wrapped in a Nazi flag. The moment Manuel touches the spear, he becomes possessed by a malevolent supernatural force. He walks barefoot across desert highways, surviving impacts that should kill him, traveling north toward Los Angeles with unnatural purpose. The opening establishes the film's premise: the supernatural world is real, the war between Heaven and Hell is fought through human proxies on Earth, and a major escalation has just begun. John Constantine (Keanu Reeves) is introduced exorcising a young Latina girl in a Los Angeles tenement. The exorcism reveals that the demon possessing her is a half-breed, a creature that should be unable to enter the human plane. Half-breeds are bound by the rules of detente: they may influence humans through whispers and suggestion but may not directly cross over. A demon making physical contact with a person on Earth is a violation of the cosmic balance Constantine has spent his career enforcing. He extracts the demon by trapping it in a magical mirror and shattering it, then leaves the apartment chain-smoking despite his terminal lung cancer diagnosis. Constantine has months to live and knows it. --- ### Cowboys & Aliens (2011) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/cowboys-aliens-2011.html **Director:** Jon Favreau **Studio:** Universal Pictures **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6/10 **Lead cast:** Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell **Synopsis:** A stranger with no memory of his past wanders into Absolution, Arizona — where he and his new allies must fight off an alien invasion using only their guns and fists. **Plot overview:** Jon Favreau's 2011 film adapted Scott Mitchell Rosenberg's coordinated continued-2006-graphic-novel into a coordinated continued-Western-and-science-fiction-genre-hybrid production starring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in coordinated continued-1873-Arizona-desert-environment with the introduction of an coordinated continued-amnesiac-man (Daniel Craig) who awakens in a coordinated continued-isolated-desert-location with no coordinated continued-memory of his coordinated continued-personal-identity. He has a coordinated continued-mysterious-metallic-bracelet attached to his wrist and a coordinated continued-non-bleeding-wound on his abdomen. His coordinated continued-immediate-engagement with coordinated continued-three-bandit-civilians produces a coordinated continued-immediate-combat-engagement; the coordinated continued-supernatural-combat-aptitude that the broader-amnesiac-man demonstrates substantially exceeds standard-human-aptitude expectations. The amnesiac-man's coordinated continued-arrival at the coordinated continued-frontier-town Absolution provides the picture's primary supporting-character introduction. The coordinated continued-town's coordinated continued-civilian-population includes the local sheriff John Taggart (Keith Carradine), the local Reverend Meacham (Clancy Brown), the local widow Maria (Ana de la Reguera), and a coordinated continued-young-woman Ella Swenson (Olivia Wilde) whose coordinated continued-personal-engagement with the amnesiac-man provides the picture's primary supporting-character-engagement throughline. The town's coordinated continued-administrative-engagement is substantially-shaped by the broader-Dolarhyde cattle-ranching-administrative-organization led by Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), whose coordinated continued-substantial-economic-influence dominates the broader-town-administrative arrangements. --- ### Daredevil (2003) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/daredevil-2003.html **Director:** Mark Steven Johnson **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.3/10 **Lead cast:** Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Michael Clarke Duncan, Colin Farrell **Synopsis:** A blinded young boy grows up to become a New York City attorney by day and the costumed vigilante Daredevil by night, seeking justice against the criminal underworld of Hell's Kitchen. **Plot overview:** Mark Steven Johnson's 2003 film starring Ben Affleck adapted Marvel's blind superhero into a Hell's Kitchen-set noir thriller. The picture preceded the more-acclaimed Netflix series adaptation but established the foundational visual template for the character on screen. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in present-day New York City with Matt Murdock / Daredevil (Ben Affleck) collapsing inside a church after sustaining serious injuries in an off-screen confrontation. Father Everett (Derrick O'Connor), the priest who has known Matt since childhood, ministers to him as Matt slips into unconsciousness. The film then enters extended flashback to provide Matt's origin and lead the viewer back to the present-day collapse. Young Matt grew up in Hell's Kitchen, the son of aging boxer Jack 'The Devil' Murdock (David Keith), whose fights kept the family fed but whose drinking and broken career put Matt in constant emotional turbulence. Matt's origin story is the film's first major sequence. Walking home from school as a child, Matt witnesses his father in an alley meeting with the local enforcer Fallon, accepting a bribe to lose his next bout. Matt flees in shock, runs into the path of a chemical-waste delivery truck whose contents spill over him, and loses his sight permanently. The same chemical exposure that blinds him also enhances his remaining four senses to superhuman levels: he can hear individual heartbeats from blocks away, smell trace molecular signatures, taste ingredients in foods at parts-per-million, and feel the texture of fabric through closed walls. He develops an ability to navigate his physical surroundings through echolocation-like sound mapping that he calls his radar sense. --- ### Dark Phoenix (2019) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/dark-phoenix-2019.html **Director:** Simon Kinberg **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.7/10 **Lead cast:** Sophie Turner, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain **Synopsis:** Jean Grey accidentally absorbs and is overwhelmed by a powerful cosmic force during a rescue mission in space, transforming her into the near-omnipotent Dark Phoenix. **Plot overview:** Simon Kinberg's 2019 film concluded the Fox-produced X-Men franchise that began with Bryan Singer's X-Men in 2000. The picture starred Sophie Turner as Jean Grey in a second cinematic adaptation of the Dark Phoenix Saga storyline. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in 1975 with the introduction of a young Jean Grey, an eight-year-old girl whose latent telepathic abilities have just emerged during a family-car-trip vacation. Jean's telepathic distress causes a car-radio malfunction that her mother is unable to control; the resulting head-on collision kills her mother and severely injures her father. Jean's father, traumatized by the event and unable to cope with Jean's manifested abilities, surrenders her to the custody of Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), whom the local hospital recognizes as the appropriate guardian for emerging-mutant minors. Xavier's psychic intervention with the young Jean involves placing a series of mental blocks across her memories of the accident, ostensibly to prevent her from being psychologically harmed by the trauma of her mother's death. The main narrative picks up in 1992. The X-Men have become publicly-celebrated heroes who operate under direct White House authorization following the events of X-Men: Apocalypse (1983 in-universe). The team is summoned by President Reagan's (Brian d'Arcy James) successor to rescue the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour, which has been disabled by a previously-undetected solar-energy phenomenon while attempting an emergency Earth-return. The X-Men's coordinated space-rescue operation forms the picture's opening setpiece. Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), now an adult X-Men team member, volunteers to remain aboard the shuttle to recover the final astronaut while the rest of the team evacuates to the X-Men's blackbird transport. --- ### Deadpool (2016) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/deadpool-2016.html **Director:** Tim Miller **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8/10 **Lead cast:** Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, Ed Skrein, T.J. Miller **Synopsis:** Former Special Forces operative turned mercenary Wade Wilson dons a new identity as Deadpool after a rogue experiment leaves him with accelerated healing powers and a very dark, twisted sense of humor. **Plot overview:** Tim Miller's 2016 film finally got Wade Wilson on screen properly after Ryan Reynolds spent over a decade lobbying for it. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a freeze-framed pile-up on a Manhattan highway, the camera spinning slowly through it while Deadpool's voiceover narrates a parody of cinema's standard opening credit sequence — listing himself as God's Perfect Idiot, his director as An Overpaid Tool, his villain as A British Villain. Once the credits finish, the action resumes mid-fight. Deadpool, in his red-and-black mercenary costume, has been hunting a black SUV convoy for the British man inside. He systematically dispatches the convoy's gunmen using two katanas and twin pistols. He fires twelve bullets into a corridor of attackers, runs out of ammunition, miscounts, and complains directly to camera about it. The scene's rhythm is established immediately: Deadpool talks directly to the audience while killing everyone around him. The story flashes back to two years earlier. Wade Wilson is a former U.S. Special Forces soldier turned freelance mercenary in Manhattan, taking small jobs through a bar called Sister Margaret's School for Wayward Children, where the bartender Weasel runs a deadpool — a betting board on which mercenary will die next. Wade meets a sex worker named Vanessa Carlysle. The two share a brutal sense of humor and fall in love over a series of sequence-bonding holiday montages. Wade proposes. The morning after the engagement, he collapses in the bathroom. He has been diagnosed with metastatic late-stage cancer affecting his liver, lungs, prostate, and brain. The prognosis is fatal. A mysterious stranger in a suit approaches him in the bar with an alternative: an experimental program that claims to cure cancer and unlock latent superhuman abilities. --- ### Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/deadpool-wolverine-2024.html **Director:** Shawn Levy **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.8/10 **Lead cast:** Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen **Synopsis:** Deadpool is recruited by the Time Variance Authority and partners with an aging, reluctant Wolverine on a mission that threatens to alter Marvel history — and the fate of the Multiverse. **Plot overview:** Shawn Levy's 2024 film brought Deadpool into the official Marvel Cinematic Universe through a multiverse-jumping team-up with Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. The picture was the first R-rated film in the MCU and grossed over a billion dollars globally. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with Wade Wilson / Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) digging up the grave of Logan / Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) at the location where Wolverine died at the end of Logan (2017). Wade extracts Logan's adamantium-laced skeleton from the grave and uses the ulna and radius bones as twin swords to massacre a strike-team of Time Variance Authority (TVA) agents who have arrived to detain him. The TVA is the multiverse-policing organization first introduced in the Loki Disney+ series. The opening title sequence, set to NSYNC's 'Bye Bye Bye,' shows Wade dancing while drenched in TVA-agent blood. The film's main plot picks up six years after Deadpool 2. Wade has retired from mercenary work and is now selling used cars in suburban New York City under his original civilian identity. He is dating Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) but their relationship has cooled into separation; she has moved on emotionally while he has been unable to commit to ordinary suburban life. Wade's birthday party at his old friend Peter's apartment is interrupted by the arrival of TVA agents, who arrest Wade and transport him to the TVA headquarters. The TVA representative Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) informs Wade that his original Earth-10005 timeline (the Fox-X-Men cinematic universe) is dying because its anchor being, the original Wolverine, died in 2029. --- ### Deadpool 2 (2018) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/deadpool-2-2018.html **Director:** David Leitch **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.7/10 **Lead cast:** Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Zazie Beetz, Julian Dennison **Synopsis:** Wade Wilson must assemble a team of mutants to protect a troubled teenager from the time-traveling soldier Cable, who has come from the future to eliminate the boy. **Plot overview:** David Leitch's 2018 sequel continued Ryan Reynolds's Deadpool franchise with the introduction of Cable, Domino, and the X-Force. The film expanded the Deadpool universe while maintaining the original's R-rated, fourth-wall-breaking comedic style. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with Wade Wilson / Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) celebrating his anniversary with girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), now living together in a shared New York apartment. Wade has been working as a freelance international assassin, traveling to Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Sicily to eliminate various criminals, drug dealers, and warlords. His career trajectory has been steady upward. The opening anniversary celebration is interrupted when one of Wade's targets has tracked him back to his apartment for a revenge-counter-attack. Wade kills the assassins but Vanessa is shot during the firefight and dies in his arms. Wade's grief at her death drives him to attempt suicide using gasoline, matches, and his own apartment's gas line. His regenerative healing factor prevents the death. Colossus (Stefan Kapičić) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) recover Wade's mostly-disintegrated body and bring him to the X-Mansion, where the X-Men attempt to rehabilitate him. Wade, depressed and unwilling, accepts a probationary X-Men role only because it gives him purpose. His first official X-Men mission is to negotiate the surrender of a young mutant named Russell Collins / Firefist (Julian Dennison), who is in front of a Vancouver orphanage in a public mutant-power tantrum. Wade discovers that the orphanage is the Essex House for Mutant Rehabilitation, a facility being run as a torture-experimental laboratory by the orphanage director (Eddie Marsan). Wade kills the director in front of Russell, an act for which Wade and Russell are both arrested and incarcerated at the Ice Box, a maximum-security mutant-suppression facility. --- ### Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (2020) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/demon-slayer-mugen-train-2020.html **Director:** Haruo Sotozaki **Studio:** ufotable **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Japanese **Audience rating:** 8.3/10 **Lead cast:** Natsuki Hanae, Akari Kito, Hiro Shimono, Yoshitsugu Matsuoka **Synopsis:** Tanjiro and his friends join the Flame Hashira Rengoku on a mission aboard the Mugen Train, where over 40 people have mysteriously vanished. A stunning adaptation of Koyoharu Gotouge's manga. **Plot overview:** Haruo Sotozaki's 2020 anime film adapts the Mugen Train arc of Koyoharu Gotouge's Demon Slayer manga series. The picture became the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time and a landmark of contemporary anime cinema. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with brief recap-footage of the Demon Slayer television series's primary character arcs and core mythology. The story is set in Taisho-era Japan, where a covert organization called the Demon Slayer Corps protects human civilians from demonic predators. Each demon is a corrupted human transformed by Muzan Kibutsuji's blood, retaining human cognition while requiring human-consumption for survival. The Corps's elite ranks are the Hashira, nine senior swordsmen each specialized in a distinct breathing technique that channels combat-power in unique elemental directions. The picture's main protagonist team includes the determined teenager Tanjiro Kamado, his demon-transformed-but-protected younger sister Nezuko, his fearful but talented companion Zenitsu Agatsuma, and the wild-tempered Inosuke Hashibira. The picture's primary mission is established through an opening briefing. Forty civilian passengers have disappeared from the Mugen Train (Infinity Train), a long-distance rail line operating across central Honshu. The disappearances are clearly demon-attack-related, but the Corps's investigators have been unable to identify the responsible demon. The mission is assigned to the Flame Hashira Kyojuro Rengoku, one of the Corps's most-senior and most-revered swordsmen. Tanjiro, Zenitsu, and Inosuke are dispatched to assist Rengoku as junior support. The team's reunion at the Mugen Train's boarding platform provides the picture's primary character-team-introduction sequence. --- ### Dick Tracy (1990) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/dick-tracy-1990.html **Director:** Warren Beatty **Studio:** Buena Vista Pictures **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.4/10 **Lead cast:** Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, Madonna, Glenne Headly **Synopsis:** Square-jawed detective Dick Tracy navigates a visually bold gangster underworld, pursuing the crime boss Big Boy Caprice while becoming entangled with the alluring Breathless Mahoney. **Plot overview:** Warren Beatty's 1990 film starred the actor-director in a lavish adaptation of the Chester Gould Dick Tracy comic strip. The picture's distinctive visual-style emphasized primary-color cinematography and elaborate facial-prosthetic villain designs. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in an unspecified American city during the late 1930s, where the major criminal organizations have consolidated under the broader leadership of Alphonse 'Big Boy' Caprice (Al Pacino). Caprice's coordinated continued-criminal-organization includes a accumulated-collection of distinctive-villain-character figures, each individual coordinated continued-villain-figure characterized by exaggerated coordinated continued physical-features achieved through extensive coordinated continued prosthetic-makeup application. The opening establishes the city's broader-criminal-environment: Pruneface, Flattop, Mumbles, Influence, Itchy, Lips Manlis, and additional coordinated continued-villain-figures all populate the broader-criminal-organization-environment. Detective Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty), the city's most-respected coordinated continued-law-enforcement-officer, is introduced through his coordinated continued-daily-routine: his coordinated continued-residence with his girlfriend Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly), his coordinated continued-engagement with his coordinated continued-newspaper-reporter-friend Vitamin Flintheart (Charles Durning), and his coordinated continued-investigative-engagement with the broader-criminal-organization activities. Tracy's coordinated continued-trademark-yellow-fedora-hat and coordinated continued-yellow-overcoat provide the picture's primary visual-identifying signature; his coordinated continued-two-way-wrist-radio communication-device represents one of the picture's most-recognizable coordinated continued-period-detail technological-anachronisms. --- ### Doctor Strange (2016) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/doctor-strange-2016.html **Director:** Scott Derrickson **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.5/10 **Lead cast:** Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Tilda Swinton **Synopsis:** After a career-ending accident, a brilliant surgeon embarks on a journey of healing that leads him to the mystic arts — and a calling to protect the world from forces beyond imagination. **Plot overview:** Scott Derrickson's 2016 film introduced the mystic arts to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and cast Benedict Cumberbatch as the Sorcerer Supreme. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in London at the Kamar-Taj hidden order's secondary sanctum, where a man named Kaecilius and his disciples breach the sanctum's defenses and steal pages from an ancient text. The Ancient One — a bald, ageless sorceress and the head of the order — pursues them through a series of reality-warping environments where buildings fold, streets bend, and gravity reverses on command. The fight ends with Kaecilius escaping with the stolen pages. Cut to New York, where Stephen Strange — a wildly arrogant and brilliant neurosurgeon — is performing complex procedures with surgical precision and entertaining hospital colleagues with his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure pop music. He lives in a luxury apartment, drives a high-performance sports car, and treats his coworkers (especially his colleague and former lover Christine Palmer) with cool dismissiveness. Driving to a speaking engagement at a New York gala, Strange becomes distracted reviewing patient files at high speed. His car crashes off a cliff. He survives but suffers extensive nerve damage to both hands. After months of failed surgeries and rehabilitation, his hands tremble so badly he cannot perform even basic operations. His career is over. He spends his savings hunting any treatment, traditional or experimental, that might restore him. When his money runs out, he hears about a paraplegic former patient who allegedly walked again after visiting a place in Nepal called Kamar-Taj. With his last credit card maxed, Strange travels to Kathmandu and follows scant directions to the order's hidden compound. --- ### Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/doctor-strange-in-the-multiverse-of-madness-2022.html **Director:** Sam Raimi **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.9/10 **Lead cast:** Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Rachel McAdams, Chiwetel Ejiofor **Synopsis:** Doctor Strange teams with a mysterious teenager who can travel between multiverses, but their journey threatens to unleash unspeakable evil as they encounter the Scarlet Witch. **Plot overview:** Sam Raimi's 2022 horror-tinged sequel pulled Doctor Strange across the multiverse to confront a Wanda Maximoff corrupted by the Darkhold. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in a flowing magical dimension where a different version of Doctor Strange — clean-shaven, ponytailed, in a slightly different cloak — is fleeing a demonic creature alongside a teenage girl. The girl, America Chavez, has the unique multiversal ability to punch open star-shaped portals between realities, but cannot yet control when she does so. The demon attacks. This Strange tries to harvest America's powers in order to save them both, an act that will kill her in the process. Before he can complete the absorption, the demon kills him. America activates her ability accidentally and falls through a portal to a different reality. Cut to the prime MCU. The original Strange we know wakes from this exact dream the morning of Christine Palmer's wedding to another man. He attends the reception, makes peace with his lost love, and wishes her well. Walking the streets of Manhattan after the reception, Strange witnesses an interdimensional invasion from above. A massive octopus-tentacled creature called Gargantos is chasing the same teenager from his dream. Strange and Wong intercept and defeat Gargantos. They take America to Kamar-Taj, where she explains everything. The recurring dreams Strange has been having are not dreams. They are the lives of Strange variants in other realities, witnessed by his consciousness as it bleeds across the multiverse. America is being hunted by an unknown entity that wants to harvest her powers to traverse the multiverse permanently. Strange consults the Book of Vishanti — Kamar-Taj's most sacred grimoire — for a counterspell. --- ### Dragon Ball Super: Broly (2018) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/dragon-ball-super-broly-2018.html **Director:** Tatsuya Nagamine **Studio:** Toei Animation **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Japanese **Audience rating:** 7.8/10 **Lead cast:** Masako Nozawa, Ryou Horikawa, Bin Shimada **Synopsis:** Goku and Vegeta encounter Broly, a Saiyan warrior of unprecedented power who was exiled by King Vegeta as a baby. The three Saiyans clash in an explosive battle unlike any before. Based on Akira Toriyama's manga. **Plot overview:** Tatsuya Nagamine's 2018 anime film served as the twentieth Dragon Ball theatrical feature and the first canonical adaptation of the Broly character into the official Dragon Ball Super continuity. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive Planet Vegeta-set prologue establishing the broader Saiyan civilization's pre-destruction context. King Vegeta, the ruler of the Saiyan royal family, has just been informed of the birth of his son Vegeta IV, the future Prince Vegeta. The kingdom's broader political situation is precarious: the Saiyan species has been working as an enforcer-class under the broader Frieza Force, the galactic-empire criminal organization led by the tyrant Frieza. King Vegeta's parallel discovery of an unusually-high power-level reading from a recently-born Saiyan infant named Broly produces immediate political concerns. Broly's power-level reading exceeds the royal-family's expected hereditary ranges, and King Vegeta is unwilling to permit a non-royal Saiyan to potentially exceed his own son's eventual combat capabilities. King Vegeta's response is the exile of the infant Broly to the harsh frontier planet Vampa, a permanently-dangerous-fauna-inhabited remote world. Broly's father Paragus, a senior Saiyan military officer, refuses to accept the exile and pursues his son's ship to Vampa, where Paragus's coordinated arrival is delayed by his pursuing ship's mechanical-malfunction crash. Paragus survives the crash and locates the infant Broly. The father-and-son have been stranded on Vampa for the subsequent forty years, surviving through Paragus's combat-tactical-leadership and Broly's developing combat-aptitude across his natural Saiyan-power-accumulation timeline. --- ### Dredd (2012) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/dredd-2012.html **Director:** Pete Travis **Studio:** Lionsgate **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** 2000 AD **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.1/10 **Lead cast:** Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, Lena Headey, Wood Harris **Synopsis:** Judge Dredd and rookie Judge Anderson are trapped in a future megacity high-rise controlled by ruthless crime lord Ma-Ma — must fight their way through 200 floors of mayhem. **Plot overview:** Pete Travis's 2012 R-rated film starred Karl Urban as Judge Dredd in a dystopian-future-set adaptation of the British comic-book character. The picture is widely regarded as the most-faithful Judge Dredd cinematic adaptation and a cult-classic of post-2010 sci-fi action cinema. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive dystopian-future world-establishing voiceover. The picture's setting is the year 2099 in the megacity Mega-City One, a sprawling 800-million-population urban environment occupying the entire former Eastern Seaboard of the United States. The city's broader social-and-economic conditions are catastrophic: 87% unemployment, persistent organized-crime control of significant urban territories, and 17,000 reported serious crimes per day. The municipal response has been the establishment of the Judges, a unified law-enforcement-judicial-executioner authority whose individual officers possess immediate arrest-trial-sentencing power across all crimes. The Judges' presence keeps the city marginally functional but cannot fully suppress the underlying criminal economy. Judge Joseph Dredd (Karl Urban), one of the most-experienced and most-effective Judges currently serving in Mega-City One, is introduced through a coordinated traffic-pursuit and storefront-confrontation sequence. The opening establishes Dredd's combat capabilities: he wears an armored uniform with helmet-visor protection that conceals his face throughout the picture's runtime, carries a Lawgiver pistol capable of firing multiple specialized ammunition types through voice-command selection, and operates with the absolute authority of his Judge status. The opening sequence demonstrates Dredd's combat efficiency, his moral commitment to procedural-legal compliance even in extreme circumstances, and his willingness to apply lethal force when legally required. --- ### Drona (2008) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/drona-2008.html **Director:** Goldie Behl **Studio:** Reliance Entertainment **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 4/10 **Lead cast:** Abhishek Bachchan, Priyanka Chopra, Kay Kay Menon **Synopsis:** A mild-mannered man discovers he is the last in a line of immortal warriors — a Drona — destined to protect a secret elixir that gives immortality, hunted by an evil sorceress. **Plot overview:** Goldie Behl's 2008 Hindi-language fantasy film starred Abhishek Bachchan as Aditya, a young man who learns he is the chosen warrior Drona in an ancient prophecy. The picture was widely considered one of Bollywood's most-expensive commercial failures of its era. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive mythological prologue voice-over establishing the broader cosmology of the Drona legend. An ancient prophecy across multiple Indian-civilization scriptures identifies a chosen warrior called Drona, the protector of the divine elixir of immortality (Amrut). Drona's bloodline has been preserved across centuries through carefully-arranged genetic succession, with each generation's Drona awaiting the moment when the elixir's protection becomes critical. The current generation's threat is Riz Raizada (Kay Kay Menon), a sorcerer-warrior whose own bloodline has been pursuing the elixir for centuries with the intention of seizing immortality for himself and his successors. Aditya (Abhishek Bachchan), the current incarnation of Drona, has been living unaware of his cosmic destiny in present-day Mumbai. He was orphaned as a young child following his parents' deaths in a tragic accident he survived, and was raised by an emotionally-distant aunt and uncle who never acknowledged his special inheritance. Aditya's adult life consists of low-wage employment, social isolation, and a romantic-relationship deficit. His daily routine is interrupted when his apartment is visited by a mysterious motorcyclist named Sonia (Priyanka Chopra), an active member of an ancient warrior-order who has been preparing for Drona's eventual identification. --- ### Endhiran (2010) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/endhiran-2010.html **Director:** S. Shankar **Studio:** Sun Pictures **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 7/10 **Lead cast:** Rajinikanth, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Danny Denzongpa **Synopsis:** A scientist creates an android robot indistinguishable from humans, but the robot develops emotions and falls in love, eventually being reprogrammed as a super-villain by a rival. **Plot overview:** S. Shankar's 2010 Indian Tamil-language science-fiction film starred Rajinikanth in dual lead roles as both the scientist Vaseegaran and his android creation Chitti. The picture became the highest-grossing Tamil film of all time at the point of its release. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with Dr. Vaseegaran (Rajinikanth), a brilliant Indian scientist whose coordinated decade-long research project has been the coordinated-development of a coordinated humanoid android with coordinated-combat-and-civilian-utility aptitude. Vaseegaran's coordinated-research has been substantially-funded by the Indian-government's coordinated-defense-research-administrative system; the coordinated-android's intended deployment-purpose is the coordinated-civilian-emergency-response and coordinated-military-combat-support across multiple coordinated-operational-environments. The opening sequence establishes Vaseegaran's coordinated-relationship with his coordinated-personal-fiancée Sana (Aishwarya Rai), a Chennai-area medical-student whose coordinated-personal-life has been substantially-affected by Vaseegaran's coordinated-research-obsessive-priorities. Vaseegaran's coordinated-android creation, named Chitti (also played by Rajinikanth in coordinated-dual-role), is coordinated-publicly-revealed at a coordinated-research-presentation event. Chitti's coordinated-combat-and-civilian-utility aptitude is coordinated-immediately-impressive: his coordinated-physical-strength substantially exceeds standard-human-aptitude, his coordinated-cognitive-aptitude includes coordinated-instantaneous-language-translation and coordinated-mathematical-problem-solving, his coordinated-mobility-aptitude includes coordinated-supernatural-speed and coordinated-supernatural-aerial-leap-capability. Vaseegaran's coordinated-intended-deployment of Chitti for the broader Indian-government coordinated-military-administrative-system requires Chitti's coordinated-formal-approval through a coordinated-research-committee evaluation procedure. --- ### Eternals (2021) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/eternals-2021.html **Director:** Chloé Zhao **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.3/10 **Lead cast:** Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Kit Harington **Synopsis:** An immortal group of heroes sent to Earth thousands of years ago must reunite to protect humanity from their evil counterparts — the Deviants — and confront a stunning revelation. **Plot overview:** Chloé Zhao's 2021 film introduced ten ancient cosmic beings who had quietly lived among humanity for seven thousand years. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a cosmic-scale prologue. The Celestials — vast star-sized beings that birth galaxies and sustain cosmic balance — created and dispatched the Eternals: a group of ten genetically engineered immortal warriors with unique individual abilities, sent to protect Earth from a parasitic species called the Deviants. The Eternals have been on Earth for over seven thousand years, watching humanity's development from Mesopotamia through the Industrial Revolution into the present, while quietly hunting Deviants in secret. Their leader is the immensely powerful Ajak, who serves as the team's direct connection to the Celestial Arishem. Cut to present-day London, where the Eternal warrior Sersi works as a museum curator and lives a quiet domestic life with another Eternal named Sprite (an eternal child) and her human boyfriend Dane Whitman. A massive earthquake strikes London. From the rubble emerges a Deviant — except all Deviants were supposedly hunted to extinction five hundred years earlier. Sersi, Sprite, and Ikaris (Sersi's former lover, who can fly and project laser-energy from his eyes) defeat the creature. Concerned, Sersi tracks down the rest of the team across the world. They find Kingo, a Bollywood film star and pansexual showman; Phastos, an inventor and family man living quietly in Chicago; Druid, a melancholic emotion-controller working as a teacher in a remote Australian village; Makkari, a deaf super-speedster living aboard the still-orbiting team transport ship; Gilgamesh, a powerful warrior caring for an elderly Thena (a fierce sword-wielder suffering from a degenerative cosmic-mind condition called Mahd Wy'ry); and Ajak, who has been living on a small farm in South Dakota. --- ### Fantastic Four (2005) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/fantastic-four-2005.html **Director:** Tim Story **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.7/10 **Lead cast:** Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis, Julian McMahon **Synopsis:** Four people are granted superhuman powers after exposure to cosmic radiation and form the Fantastic Four — but their old colleague Victor Von Doom becomes their archnemesis Doctor Doom. **Plot overview:** Tim Story's 2005 film starred Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, and Michael Chiklis as Marvel's first family of superheroes. The picture launched a brief franchise that included a 2007 sequel before being rebooted in 2015. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with brilliant but financially-struggling scientist Dr. Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd) and his loyal pilot-engineer best friend Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) approaching wealthy entrepreneur Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon) for funding of an experimental cosmic-radiation research mission. Doom's Latveria-based corporation Doom Industries provides the financial backing and the privately-owned space-station platform required for the mission. Doom's price for his participation: his ex-girlfriend Sue Storm (Jessica Alba) must accompany the mission as the company's lead genetics researcher. The opening establishes the love-triangle dynamic among Reed, Sue, and Doom that will inform the film's character relationships. The crew assembles aboard Doom Industries' orbital research platform: Reed Richards, Ben Grimm, Sue Storm, her younger brother Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), and Doom himself. Their mission is to study an approaching cosmic-radiation storm that Reed has predicted will pass safely past Earth's orbital position. Reed's predictive calculations are off by approximately nine hours; the storm arrives ahead of schedule, while the crew is still in the station's exterior observation deck. The cosmic radiation engulfs all five crew members before the station's shielding can be deployed. The radiation causes immediate disorientation and cellular damage to each crew member; they survive only because the station's automated emergency-response system seals the exterior compartments and returns the station to Earth orbit. --- ### Fantastic Four (2015) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/fantastic-four-2015.html **Director:** Josh Trank **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 4.3/10 **Lead cast:** Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell **Synopsis:** Four young scientists teleport to an alternate dimension and are exposed to an energy that fundamentally transforms each of them in unexpected ways, forcing them to work together against a new threat. **Plot overview:** Josh Trank's 2015 reboot reimagined the Marvel first-family in a darker, body-horror-inflected interpretation that became one of the most-publicly-troubled productions in modern superhero cinema. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive flashback to suburban New York 1996, where a young Reed Richards (Owen Judge) and his school best friend Ben Grimm (Evan Hannemann) are building a primitive prototype matter-transmission device in Reed's garage. The young Reed has been bullied at school for his nerdish curiosity and home-engineering hobbies; the young Ben, the son of a hostile car-junkyard family, finds his social refuge in Reed's friendship. The garage matter-transmitter does work, briefly: small objects placed in the device materialize moments later in a parallel dimensional location the young Reed cannot yet identify. The opening establishes the friendship between Reed and Ben that will eventually be tested by the film's later events. The film's main plot picks up at a New York City high-school science fair where the now-teenaged Reed Richards (Miles Teller) demonstrates a working full-scale matter-transmission device. The demonstration goes wrong in a deliberately-staged disqualification ruling by the science-fair judges, but it attracts the attention of Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), the head of the Baxter Foundation think tank, who recognizes the device's authentic dimensional-physics breakthrough. Franklin invites Reed to join the Baxter Foundation's classified inter-dimensional-physics research program in New York. Reed's relocation to the Baxter Foundation begins the film's primary character-development arc. --- ### Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/fantastic-four-rise-of-the-silver-surfer-2007.html **Director:** Tim Story **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.6/10 **Lead cast:** Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis, Doug Jones **Synopsis:** The Fantastic Four meet their most powerful enemy yet when the enigmatic Silver Surfer arrives on Earth as herald to the world-devouring Galactus. **Plot overview:** Tim Story's 2007 sequel introduced the cosmic-scale Silver Surfer and Galactus characters into Marvel's first-family franchise, expanding the scope of the original picture's grounded-superhero premise. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with cosmic-establishing footage of a distant world being approached by a silver-skinned humanoid figure on a surfboard-shaped vehicle. The figure scans the planet, communicates briefly with an unseen cosmic entity, and watches as the planet's atmosphere is rapidly drained over the following minutes; the surface is left a barren, lifeless husk. The opening sequence establishes the Silver Surfer (visual effects performance by Doug Jones, voiced by Laurence Fishburne) and his cosmic-master Galactus as a planetary-consumption threat operating on a galactic scale. The Surfer's next destination, the film suggests, is Earth. The main story picks up in present-day New York City, where Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd) and Sue Storm (Jessica Alba) are preparing for their long-delayed wedding ceremony. Their celebrity status as members of the Fantastic Four has complicated the wedding planning: the ceremony has been deferred multiple times due to global emergency-response demands. The current arrangement is a controlled private ceremony with limited press access, scheduled at a Manhattan rooftop venue. Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) is the best man; Johnny Storm (Chris Evans) is the maid of honor by his sister's request. The wedding's opening framing establishes both the team's celebrity-couple dynamic and the broader integration of the four heroes into civilian-celebrity culture. --- ### Fullmetal Alchemist (2017) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/fullmetal-alchemist-2017.html **Director:** Fumihiko Sori **Studio:** Warner Bros. Japan **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Japanese **Audience rating:** 6.2/10 **Lead cast:** Ryosuke Yamada, Tsubasa Honda, Dean Fujioka, Yasuko Matsuyuki **Synopsis:** Two alchemist brothers attempt to revive their dead mother using forbidden alchemy, losing their bodies in the process. They seek the Philosopher's Stone to restore what was taken. Based on Hiromu Arakawa's manga. **Plot overview:** Fumihiko Sori's 2017 live-action film adapted Hiromu Arakawa's celebrated Fullmetal Alchemist manga and anime series. The picture starred Ryosuke Yamada as Edward Elric. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive flashback to the rural Resembool village where young brothers Edward Elric (Ryosuke Yamada) and Alphonse Elric have just lost their mother to terminal illness. Their father, a wandering alchemist named Hohenheim, abandoned the family years earlier; their mother's death leaves them effectively orphaned in their childhood home. The brothers, having been raised on their absent father's alchemical-research notebooks, decide to attempt a forbidden alchemical-procedure called Human Transmutation to resurrect their mother. The procedure, theoretically impossible according to alchemical principles, requires the precise material-and-spiritual-component arrangements that the brothers have spent years preparing. The Human Transmutation procedure fails catastrophically. The alchemical-energy-feedback consumes Alphonse's entire body, leaving only his consciousness; Edward sacrifices his right arm and left leg to seal Alphonse's consciousness into an empty-suit-of-armor construct that has been displayed in their workshop. The brothers' physical-and-emotional aftermath of the failure provides the picture's opening tonal-foundation: Edward as a maimed teenage prodigy with prosthetic-mechanical limbs (the picture's title-derived 'fullmetal' name) and Alphonse as a metal-armor-encased disembodied consciousness whose ability to feel physical sensation has been permanently eliminated. --- ### Ghost Rider (2007) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/ghost-rider-2007.html **Director:** Mark Steven Johnson **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.2/10 **Lead cast:** Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Peter Fonda, Wes Bentley **Synopsis:** Stunt motorcyclist Johnny Blaze sells his soul to the devil and becomes a leather-jacketed, flaming skull-headed Spirit of Vengeance — the Ghost Rider — forced to hunt down demons. **Plot overview:** Mark Steven Johnson's 2007 film starred Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze, a stunt motorcyclist who sells his soul to the devil and is transformed into the flame-skulled supernatural bounty hunter Ghost Rider. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive backstory delivered through stylized animation and voice-over narration by the Caretaker (Sam Elliott), a mysterious cemetery-keeper whose true identity will be revealed later. The Caretaker recounts the legend of the Ghost Rider, a supernatural bounty hunter created by the devil Mephistopheles (Peter Fonda) over centuries to collect the souls of those who break their infernal contracts. The most-recent Ghost Rider, an Old West gunslinger named Carter Slade, abandoned his service to Mephistopheles in 1850 after refusing to deliver a contract for one thousand evil souls hidden in a Texas town called San Venganza. The contract has remained sealed for 150 years; Mephistopheles has been searching for a new Ghost Rider capable of recovering it. The film's main plot picks up in the late 1970s with young Johnny Blaze (Matt Long), a teenage stunt motorcyclist working in his father Barton Blaze's traveling carnival show. Barton has just been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer; Johnny, devastated by the prospect of losing his father and his planned elopement with girlfriend Roxanne Simpson (Raquel Alessi), is approached by a mysterious stranger who offers a deal: Johnny's soul in exchange for Barton's complete cure. Johnny accepts and signs the contract in his own blood. The next morning, Barton's cancer has indeed disappeared. Hours later, Barton's stunt-motorcycle act ends in a fatal crash that kills him instantly. The stranger, revealed as Mephistopheles, has cured Barton of cancer but provided no protection from accident. --- ### Glass (2019) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/glass-2019.html **Director:** M. Night Shyamalan **Studio:** Universal Pictures **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.6/10 **Lead cast:** Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy, Sarah Paulson, Anya Taylor-Joy **Synopsis:** Three super-powered men — David Dunn the Overseer, Kevin Crumb the Horde, and Elijah Price the Mr. Glass — are confined to the same psychiatric hospital, where a doctor argues their abilities are delusion. The Eastrail 177 Trilogy concludes with a confrontation that asks whether superheroes belong to comic books or reality. **Plot overview:** M. Night Shyamalan's 2019 film served as the coordinated continued-third-installment of his coordinated continued-Unbreakable-cinematic-trilogy, combining the coordinated continued-Unbreakable (2000) and Split (2016) narrative-throughlines. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in coordinated continued-Philadelphia-environment with parallel-narrative-introductions of the broader-trilogy's three primary characters. David Dunn (Bruce Willis), the coordinated continued-Unbreakable-protagonist whose coordinated continued-supernatural-aptitude includes coordinated continued-personal-invulnerability and coordinated continued-supernatural-strength, has been continuing his coordinated continued-vigilante-Philadelphia-engagement across the broader-period since the broader-Unbreakable-events. Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the coordinated continued-Split-protagonist whose coordinated continued-dissociative-identity-disorder produces his coordinated continued-twenty-four-distinct-personality-engagement (including the coordinated continued-Beast-personality whose coordinated continued-supernatural-physical-aptitude substantially exceeds standard-human-aptitude), has been continuing his coordinated continued-Beast-engagement across multiple coordinated continued-civilian-abduction-engagements. Elijah Price / Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), the coordinated continued-Unbreakable-antagonist whose coordinated continued-supernatural-aptitude includes coordinated continued-genius-level-cognitive-aptitude despite his coordinated continued-osteogenesis-imperfecta physical-condition that produces coordinated continued-extreme-bone-fragility, has been institutionalized at a coordinated continued-Philadelphia-area mental-institution across the broader-period since the broader-Unbreakable-events. Elijah's coordinated continued-institutional-residence has been characterized by his coordinated continued-mostly-non-responsive-engagement state, achieved through coordinated continued-extensive-sedation-medication-engagement. --- ### Green Lantern (2011) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/green-lantern-2011.html **Director:** Martin Campbell **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.6/10 **Lead cast:** Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong **Synopsis:** A test pilot is chosen by a dying alien to join an intergalactic police force called the Green Lantern Corps, wielding a power ring fueled by willpower to combat a universal threat. **Plot overview:** Martin Campbell's 2011 film starred Ryan Reynolds as test pilot Hal Jordan, who becomes Earth's representative in the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps. The picture is widely regarded as one of DC's most-commercially-disappointing theatrical adaptations. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive cosmic-narrative establishing voiceover from Tomar-Re (Geoffrey Rush), one of the senior Green Lantern Corps members. The Lantern Corps is an intergalactic policing organization powered by the willpower-based Green Lantern energy, an emerald-spectrum cosmic force whose central reservoir is contained within the Lantern home planet Oa. The Corps's membership numbers 3,600 across various sectors of the universe, each Lantern carrying a power ring that channels the Lantern energy into willpower-construct creations. The opening establishes the broader cosmic-context: a renegade Lantern called Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison) has been mortally wounded by an escaped cosmic entity called Parallax, the literal embodiment of fear-spectrum cosmic energy whose escape from a Lantern containment cell has just precipitated the picture's primary crisis. The wounded Abin Sur's spacecraft crashes on Earth, where his Green Lantern power ring releases itself from his finger to seek out a worthy successor on the planet. The ring's autonomous-search mechanism selects Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a Coast City-based test pilot whose latest mishap during an aerial-combat training exercise has just resulted in him being fired from his employer Ferris Aircraft. Hal's professional and personal life have both reached low points: his romantic relationship with Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), the daughter of the Ferris Aircraft CEO, is on indefinite hiatus due to his repeated professional irresponsibility, and his estranged relationship with his nephew Jason has been strained by Hal's father's death years earlier. --- ### Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/guardians-of-the-galaxy-2014.html **Director:** James Gunn **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.9/10 **Lead cast:** Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper **Synopsis:** A ragtag group of intergalactic misfits — a human outlaw, a warrior, a destroyer, a thieving raccoon, and a sentient tree — must unite to save the universe from a fanatical Kree radical. **Plot overview:** James Gunn's 2014 cosmic adventure took a niche Marvel team most audiences had never heard of and turned them into one of the MCU's most beloved franchises. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in 1988 in a hospital corridor in suburban Missouri. Eight-year-old Peter Quill sits outside his dying mother's room, listening to a mix tape on yellow Sony Walkman headphones. His grandfather urges him to come inside. He sees his mother on the bed. She tells him she loves him and asks him to take her hand. He cannot bring himself to do it. She dies. Peter runs out of the hospital sobbing into a field. A bright light passes overhead. A spacecraft descends. Peter is abducted, pulled up into the ship by a tractor beam, his Walkman clutched in his hand. Twenty-six years later, on the abandoned planet Morag, an adult Peter Quill — calling himself Star-Lord — is dancing through a derelict ruin to the same Walkman tape. He retrieves a metallic orb from a temple altar, only to be ambushed by mercenaries working for Ronan the Accuser, a fanatical Kree warlord. Peter escapes to his ship the Milano. The orb, he learns from his contacts, has a buyer willing to pay billions: an unidentified figure who only wants the artifact and asks no questions. Peter agrees to the sale. He betrays his adoptive father Yondu Udonta, the Ravager who kidnapped him as a child, by trying to sell the orb himself rather than handing it over to Yondu's crew. Yondu places a bounty on Peter. --- ### Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/guardians-of-the-galaxy-vol-2-2017.html **Director:** James Gunn **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.6/10 **Lead cast:** Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Michael Rooker, Kurt Russell **Synopsis:** The Guardians struggle to keep their newfound family together while unraveling the mystery of Peter Quill's true parentage — with the fate of the universe at stake. **Plot overview:** James Gunn's 2017 sequel deepened the Guardians' family-of-misfits dynamic with the introduction of Peter Quill's biological father. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a flashback to 1980 Earth: a young Meredith Quill is taken on a romantic drive by her then-boyfriend, who is revealed by the camera to be a humanoid alien. Cut to the present-day Sovereign homeworld, where the Guardians have been hired by the genetically engineered Sovereign people to protect their precious anulax batteries from an interdimensional monster called the Abilisk. The Guardians defeat the Abilisk through a chaotic but successful team operation, with baby Groot dancing through the foreground while the rest of the team handles the actual combat. The Sovereigns reward them with custody of Nebula — Gamora's adopted sister — but Rocket secretly steals a handful of the anulax batteries on the way out. The Sovereign immediately deploys an entire fleet of remote-controlled fighter drones to pursue the team across the galaxy. The drone chase nearly destroys the Milano. The team crash-lands on a small forested planet, but not before being saved at the last moment by a mysterious humanoid figure piloting his own ship. The man introduces himself as Ego, the Living Planet — a celestial god-being who has been searching for Peter Quill for decades. He reveals himself as Peter's biological father. The 1980 Earth flashback at the start of the film was Ego romancing Meredith Quill. Peter is part-celestial, the only known half-mortal son of Ego, and inherited dormant cosmic powers from his father's lineage. Yondu's Ravagers had abducted Peter at age eight under unclear circumstances — Peter had always assumed Yondu was the villain, but new context begins to form. --- ### Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/guardians-of-the-galaxy-vol-3-2023.html **Director:** James Gunn **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.9/10 **Lead cast:** Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Pom Klementieff, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel **Synopsis:** The Guardians embark on a mission to protect Rocket from his dark past, confronting the twisted High Evolutionary who created him as part of his quest to build a perfect society. **Plot overview:** James Gunn's 2023 film concluded the original Guardians trilogy and the Star-Lord-led iteration of the team. The picture was Gunn's farewell to Marvel before his transition to DC Studios. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens at Knowhere, the severed-Celestial-head space station that has become the Guardians' headquarters since the events of Avengers: Endgame. Peter Quill / Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) is shown drinking heavily and grieving the death of the Gamora he loved (the Endgame timeline still resulting in a dead Gamora; the alternate-timeline Gamora from 2014 who arrived during Endgame is alive but has no memory of him and has rejoined the Ravagers under Stakar Ogord). The peaceful daily life of Knowhere is shattered when Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), a gold-skinned super-being created by the Sovereign people specifically to kill the Guardians in revenge for Vol. 2's events, attacks the station and critically injures Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper). Rocket's injuries are severe enough that he requires immediate emergency surgery. The Guardians attempt to operate but discover that Rocket has been built with a hidden internal kill-switch by his original creator: the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a megalomaniacal self-styled god-figure who runs an entire alternate-evolution research planet called Counter-Earth. The kill-switch will detonate any attempt at unauthorized internal modification. The Guardians realize they need the bypass code, which only High Evolutionary's organization possesses, in order to save Rocket's life. The mission to retrieve the code becomes the film's primary throughline. --- ### Hellboy (2004) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/hellboy-2004.html **Director:** Guillermo del Toro **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Dark Horse **Source material:** Dark Horse Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.8/10 **Lead cast:** Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, John Hurt, Rupert Evans, Doug Jones **Synopsis:** A demon summoned from hell during WWII is raised by a government agency to become Hellboy, a rough-hewn paranormal investigator who battles the very supernatural forces he was created to serve. **Plot overview:** Guillermo del Toro's 2004 adaptation of Mike Mignola's comic book series starred Ron Perlman as the demon-spawn paranormal investigator Hellboy. The film established del Toro as a major commercial-genre filmmaker and the Hellboy character as a long-running franchise property. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in October 1944 on the coast of Scotland, where the failing Nazi war effort has resorted to occult-warfare initiatives in a final attempt to reverse the Allied advance. The mad Russian sorcerer Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden), apparently surviving the 1916 assassination attempts on him through dark-magic preservation, has been hired by the SS to summon the Ogdru Jahad, a class of seven primordial chaos-deities sealed beyond the dimensional boundary at the dawn of creation. The opening setpiece is the summoning ritual: Rasputin, accompanied by Nazi officers Ilsa Haupstein (Bridget Hodson) and assassin Karl Ruprecht Kroenen (Ladislav Beran), opens a portal on a remote Scottish island. The summoning is interrupted by an Allied military strike force led by the young paranormal-research professor Dr. Trevor 'Broom' Bruttenholm (John Hurt) and supported by U.S. Army troops. The strike force destroys the ritual circle and kills Rasputin's surviving Nazi accomplices, but the dimensional portal has remained open just long enough for a single small entity to cross over: a red-skinned, horned, demon-baby with a giant stone right hand that he cannot remove. Bruttenholm finds the baby cowering inside a ruined chapel and adopts him. The baby is named Hellboy. The opening titles cut sixty years forward to the modern day where the adult Hellboy now serves as the primary field agent of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), a U.S. government supernatural-affairs agency operating out of a secret New Jersey facility. --- ### Hellboy (2019) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/hellboy-2019.html **Director:** Neil Marshall **Studio:** Lionsgate **Universe:** Dark Horse **Source material:** Dark Horse Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.2/10 **Lead cast:** David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane, Sasha Lane **Synopsis:** Hellboy is called to England to face Nimue the Blood Queen, a resurrected ancient sorceress who plans to rain apocalyptic destruction upon humanity. **Plot overview:** Neil Marshall's 2019 reboot starred David Harbour as a new Hellboy in a darker, R-rated interpretation that departed from Guillermo del Toro's earlier films. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in fifth-century Britain with the legendary King Arthur (Mark Stanley) leading his armies against the Blood Queen Nimue (Milla Jovovich), an immortal sorceress whose plague-spreading powers have devastated the British countryside. Arthur, wielding the magical sword Excalibur, defeats Nimue in single combat at a remote moorland and dismembers her body into six separate pieces. Each piece is sealed into an individual box and dispatched to a different distant location across the British Isles, scattered to prevent the queen's potential resurrection. Arthur's monastic order, the Knights of Saint Hubert, are tasked with maintaining the geographic separation of the boxes across the following sixteen centuries. The main story picks up in present-day Tijuana, Mexico, where Hellboy (David Harbour) has been on a private off-the-record mission to retrieve a former BPRD colleague named Esteban Ruiz. Esteban has been working undercover as an underground-wrestling cage-fighter named the Camazotz, but has fully succumbed to the vampire-bat biological transformation his cover required. Hellboy is forced to kill his former friend during a brutal cage-fight sequence in which Esteban-as-Camazotz nearly defeats him. The opening establishes Hellboy's emotional damage from the encounter and his strained relationship with his adoptive father Trevor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane), who has been calling Hellboy back to BPRD headquarters in London. --- ### Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/hellboy-ii-the-golden-army-2008.html **Director:** Guillermo del Toro **Studio:** Universal Pictures **Universe:** Dark Horse **Source material:** Dark Horse Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7/10 **Lead cast:** Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Luke Goss, Doug Jones, Jeffrey Tambor **Synopsis:** Hellboy leads the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense against the forces of a vengeful elf prince who seeks to awaken an unstoppable clockwork army to reclaim the world. **Plot overview:** Guillermo del Toro's 2008 sequel reunited Ron Perlman's Hellboy with the BPRD team and introduced an elaborate elf-kingdom mythology that established the film's reputation as the franchise's creative high-water mark. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive flashback to Christmas Eve 1955, where a young Hellboy is being read a bedtime story by his adoptive father Trevor Bruttenholm (John Hurt, reprising the role from the first film). The story Bruttenholm tells, presented as historical fact rather than fiction, recounts an ancient war between the magical creatures of Earth (elves, trolls, goblins, fairies) and the rising human civilization that had begun encroaching on their territories. The elf-king Balor commissioned the construction of the Golden Army, a mechanical-clockwork-soldier force of seventy regiments that proved unstoppable in combat. After witnessing the Army's brutality against humans, Balor signed a peace treaty: the magical creatures retreated to hidden enclaves, the Golden Army was sealed away, and a crown of three pieces was forged to control it. The fairy-tale framing establishes the film's primary conflict. Balor's son Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), the warrior of the elf kingdom, opposed the treaty and was banished for his rebellious advocacy of resumed war against humans. Nuada has been waiting in hidden exile for centuries, biding his time while modern human civilization has encroached on every remaining magical-creature enclave. He has now returned to the elf kingdom and intends to recover all three pieces of the Golden Crown to reactivate the Golden Army for a final war against humanity. The main story picks up in present-day New York City, where Nuada's first targeted theft has occurred at a Manhattan auction house: he has killed a private dealer and recovered the crown's first piece. --- ### Howard the Duck (1986) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/howard-the-duck-1986.html **Director:** Willard Huyck **Studio:** Universal Pictures **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 4.5/10 **Lead cast:** Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins **Synopsis:** Howard, a duck-billed humanoid from an alternate universe, is transported to Earth where he befriends a rock singer and must battle an alien entity that threatens the planet. **Plot overview:** Willard Huyck's 1986 film, produced by George Lucas, adapted Steve Gerber's Marvel Comics anthropomorphic-duck character into a live-action production. The picture is widely regarded as one of the most-significant commercial-and-critical failures of the modern superhero-film era. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens on the duck-civilization home planet of Howard T. Duck (voiced by Chip Zien and performed in costume by multiple actors), an anthropomorphic duck whose civilization runs in parallel to Earth's human civilization. Howard's apartment-residence, his cigar-smoking habit, his interest in pulp-magazine-style pornography, and his alimony-paying schedule are all established in the opening minutes through stylized animated-and-live-action sequences. Howard's evening relaxation is interrupted by an unexpected gravitational-anomaly that pulls him from his recliner, through his apartment's exterior wall, and across the cosmic distance separating the duck-civilization home planet and Earth. Howard's involuntary arrival on Earth deposits him in a back alley in Cleveland, Ohio, where two human muggers are attempting to rob a young woman. Howard's combat-aptitude, including his proprietary Quack-Fu martial-arts technique, allows him to drive off the muggers despite the substantial size-and-mass disadvantage relative to his human attackers. The rescued young woman is Beverly Switzler (Lea Thompson), the lead vocalist of the Cleveland-based rock band Cherry Bomb. Beverly's initial-shock response to Howard's anthropomorphic-duck physiology gradually develops into compassionate engagement; she invites Howard to spend the night at her apartment. --- ### Iron Man (2008) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/iron-man-2008.html **Director:** Jon Favreau **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.9/10 **Lead cast:** Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard **Synopsis:** Billionaire weapons manufacturer Tony Stark is captured by terrorists and builds a powered suit of armor to escape. He then uses the technology to become Iron Man, protector of the world. **Plot overview:** Jon Favreau's 2008 film launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe and cast Robert Downey Jr. in the role that would come to define his career and reshape the global film industry's approach to franchise storytelling. Below is the complete plot of the film, told in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the picture. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in a U.S. military Humvee convoy traveling through the rugged terrain of Kunar Province, Afghanistan, in the spring of the early 2000s. Tony Stark — billionaire CEO of Stark Industries, the world's largest weapons manufacturer — has just demonstrated his new Jericho missile system to high-ranking U.S. military officials. He travels back from the demonstration in a casual mood, drinking scotch and joking with the young soldiers escorting him. Without warning, the convoy is ambushed by mortar fire and dismounted gunmen. Tony scrambles for cover but is hit by shrapnel from one of his own Stark-branded munitions when an RPG detonates near him. He loses consciousness in the dust. He wakes inside a cave, in a primitive operating chamber, with a car battery wired through his chest. A captured doctor named Yinsen has saved his life by surgically implanting an electromagnet over the shrapnel that would otherwise have reached his heart. Their captors are a terrorist organization called the Ten Rings, led by a man named Raza. They demand Tony build them a working Jericho missile in exchange for his freedom — a promise both Tony and Yinsen know will not be honored. They are given workshop tools and access to crates of scavenged Stark Industries weapons. Tony agrees publicly to the demand. Privately, he and Yinsen begin building something else: a miniaturized arc reactor (replacing the cumbersome car battery) and a crude armored exoskeleton. --- ### Iron Man 2 (2010) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/iron-man-2-2010.html **Director:** Jon Favreau **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7/10 **Lead cast:** Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Scarlett Johansson, Mickey Rourke **Synopsis:** Tony Stark deals with the public fallout of his secret identity while facing a Russian physicist who uses his father's technology to exact revenge, and a rival weapons manufacturer. **Plot overview:** Jon Favreau's 2010 sequel introduced Black Widow and War Machine to the MCU and laid significant groundwork for The Avengers. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in Moscow, where physicist Anton Vanko is dying. Anton was once a Soviet scientist who collaborated with Howard Stark on the original arc reactor design before being deported to Russia by Howard for attempting to commercialize their joint invention. Anton's son Ivan watches his father die in a small apartment and immediately begins replicating the arc reactor technology himself. Cut to Manhattan six months after the events of the first Iron Man. Tony Stark has continued operating openly as Iron Man and has positioned himself as a one-man global peacekeeping force, taking credit for the absence of major international military conflicts. The U.S. government, led by Senator Stern, has demanded Tony hand over the Iron Man technology as a national-security asset. Tony refuses publicly during a televised Senate hearing. Privately, Tony is dying. The palladium core powering his arc reactor — and keeping the shrapnel from reaching his heart — is also poisoning his bloodstream. Black palladium-blood streaks creep up his neck. He has not told anyone, including his closest people. His behavior becomes erratic and self-destructive. He gives Pepper Potts the title of Stark Industries CEO, putting his entire company under her control. He hires a new personal assistant, Natalie Rushman — actually undercover S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Natasha Romanoff, sent by Nick Fury to monitor Tony's increasingly unstable condition. Tony attends a Formula One race in Monaco and steps onto the track himself, briefly racing in his own private car — directly in the path of Ivan Vanko, who has built two electrified whip-blade weapons powered by a chest-mounted arc reactor and infiltrated the race posing as a track worker. --- ### Iron Man 3 (2013) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/iron-man-3-2013.html **Director:** Shane Black **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.1/10 **Lead cast:** Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Ben Kingsley **Synopsis:** After a series of bombings by a terrorist calling himself the Mandarin, Tony Stark — suffering from PTSD — is pushed to his limits without his suit and must uncover the truth. **Plot overview:** Shane Black's 2013 follow-up reframed Tony Stark as a man dealing with severe post-traumatic stress disorder after the events of The Avengers and the Battle of New York wormhole sequence. Below is the complete plot of the film, told in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the picture. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a 1999 New Year's Eve flashback in Bern, Switzerland. A younger Tony Stark, drunk and arrogant, dismisses a brilliant but socially awkward scientist named Aldrich Killian who has come to pitch his think-tank Advanced Idea Mechanics. Tony agrees to a rooftop meeting and then deliberately stands Killian up, leaving him in the cold for hours. Tony also has a one-night stand with botanist Maya Hansen, whose plant-regeneration research Killian had been trying to interest him in. Cut to the present day — six months after the Battle of New York. Tony is suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, unable to sleep, repeatedly experiencing panic attacks triggered by reminders of the wormhole he flew through carrying a nuclear missile. He builds Iron Man suits compulsively in his Malibu workshop, hiding from his fears in obsessive engineering. A series of bombings has been claimed by an international terrorist named the Mandarin, a charismatic figure who broadcasts video manifestos directly to U.S. national television networks. The bombs leave no chemical residue — there are no explosive devices, only victims. The pattern is unprecedented. President Ellis has rebranded War Machine as the patriotic Iron Patriot for public-relations purposes; Rhodey is now operating openly under U.S. military authority hunting the Mandarin's cells. Tony's longtime bodyguard Happy Hogan is investigating a separate strange disappearance and tracks it to a TCBY in downtown Los Angeles, where he witnesses a man's spontaneous combustion. The bomb is the man. Happy is critically injured in the resulting blast. --- ### Joker (2019) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/joker-2019.html **Director:** Todd Phillips **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8.4/10 **Lead cast:** Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen **Synopsis:** Arthur Fleck, a failed comedian and abused outsider in a decaying Gotham City, descends into madness and reinvents himself as the Joker — sparking a violent uprising and becoming the symbol of a city in revolt. **Plot overview:** Todd Phillips' character study earned Joaquin Phoenix the Best Actor Oscar — only the second time the role has won an acting Oscar (after Heath Ledger). Full plot, in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout. **Plot summary (first acts):** Set in a dilapidated Gotham City around 1981, the film opens on Arthur Fleck — a 40-something failed clown-for-hire who lives with his ailing mother Penny in a tenement apartment in the Bronx-coded outer borough. Arthur suffers from a neurological condition that triggers uncontrollable bouts of laughter, often at the worst possible moments. He's a registered patient of city social services and takes seven different medications. He carries a card explaining the laughter to strangers because he cannot stop it once it starts. Arthur's only daily aspiration is to make people laugh as a stand-up comedian. He records his own jokes in a notebook between fragments of pornography and political ranting. Arthur's life is a series of small humiliations. Three teenage boys steal his sign and beat him up in an alley. His company manager threatens to fire him for losing the sign. His coworker, a man named Randall, gives Arthur a pistol "for protection" — without telling Arthur the gun is loaded. Arthur attends weekly visits with a city-funded social worker who barely listens to him. Gotham itself is reaching a breaking point: a sanitation strike has caused garbage to pile up on every corner. Wealthy elites mock the working poor on television. Crime is rampant. Mayor Stokes' administration is preparing to slash municipal services, including the social-worker program Arthur depends on. He has been quietly losing what little stability he had. --- ### Joker: Folie a Deux (2024) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/joker-folie-a-deux-2024.html **Director:** Todd Phillips **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.2/10 **Lead cast:** Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener **Synopsis:** Arthur Fleck, awaiting trial in Arkham State Hospital for his crimes as the Joker, encounters Lee Quinzel — a fellow inmate whose obsession with him sparks a romance set to song, leading them both into a shared, ruinous folie a deux. **Plot overview:** Todd Phillips's 2024 sequel to his Oscar-winning Joker film took the unprecedented step of reframing the character's continuing story as a courtroom musical-fantasy. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a stylized animated cold-open in the register of a 1940s Looney Tunes-style cartoon. The cartoon depicts Arthur Fleck and his shadow as separate entities, a Joker shadow that splits from Arthur's body, runs around independently, performs violent acts that Arthur did not consent to, and returns to him exhausted as Arthur watches the morning news showing the consequences of his shadow's behavior. The cartoon serves as a thematic prologue for everything that follows: the question of whether Arthur Fleck and his Joker persona are the same person or two beings sharing a single body. Cut to the present. It is two years after the events of Joker (2019). Arthur is awaiting trial for the five murders he openly confessed to during his Murray Franklin show appearance. He has been imprisoned at Arkham State Hospital under the supervision of guard Jackie Sullivan and chief psychiatrist Dr. Hightower. His mental state has visibly deteriorated. He is medicated heavily, has lost significant weight, and barely speaks during his daily routines. His lawyer Maryanne Stewart is preparing an insanity defense that argues Arthur and his Joker persona are dissociated identities, with the Joker bearing legal responsibility for the murders rather than Arthur himself. The defense is controversial; most of Gotham's press has decided Arthur is faking the dissociation for legal advantage. --- ### Jonah Hex (2010) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/jonah-hex-2010.html **Director:** Jimmy Hayward **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 4.7/10 **Lead cast:** Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malkovich **Synopsis:** A scarred drifter and bounty hunter with supernatural powers is forced by the U.S. military to go after a dangerous terrorist who plans to unleash a weapon of mass destruction. **Plot overview:** Jimmy Hayward's 2010 film starred Josh Brolin as the scarred Western-era bounty hunter Jonah Hex. The picture's troubled production and brief theatrical runtime (eighty-one minutes) became defining features of one of DC's most-commercially-disappointing standalone films. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive flashback narration from Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) himself, recounting his Civil War-era background. Hex was a Confederate Army soldier whose final wartime mission involved disobeying direct orders from his commanding officer Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich). The disobedience, intended to prevent civilian casualties at a Union-controlled medical facility, resulted in the death of Turnbull's own son Jeb. Turnbull's revenge for his son's death was the systematic execution of Hex's wife and young son in front of Hex himself, followed by the branding of Hex's facial flesh with a red-hot QT iron that produced the disfigurement which has defined his subsequent identity. The opening flashback continues to establish Hex's supernatural-ability inheritance. Hex was nursed back from near-death by a Crow Nation tribal medicine man whose ritualistic intervention produced an unintended supernatural side effect: Hex's body now retains a tenuous connection to the dead world, allowing him to briefly communicate with the spirits of recently-deceased individuals. His ability is limited to short-duration engagements with the recently dead and requires physical contact with the corpse to activate. The ability has become Hex's primary investigative tool in his subsequent career as a bounty hunter. --- ### Judge Dredd (1995) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/judge-dredd-1995.html **Director:** Danny Cannon **Studio:** Buena Vista Pictures **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** 2000 AD **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.2/10 **Lead cast:** Sylvester Stallone, Diane Lane, Rob Schneider, Armand Assante **Synopsis:** In the dystopian future city of Mega-City One, Judge Dredd is framed for murder and forced to go outside the city to find allies to clear his name and expose a conspiracy. **Plot overview:** Danny Cannon's 1995 film adapted the British comic-book character Judge Dredd into a coordinated continued-American-cinema commercial-action production starring Sylvester Stallone in the title role. The picture is widely regarded as one of the most-criticized individual coordinated continued-comic-book-adaptation productions of the mid-1990s era. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in the coordinated continued-Mega-City-One environment in the late twenty-second century, where the broader-civilization has been consolidated into a coordinated continued-megacity-environment following coordinated continued-catastrophic-environmental-and-political-disruption events across the broader-Earth-environment. Mega-City One's coordinated continued-civilian-population approximates several hundred million individuals; the coordinated continued-civilian-population-density has been substantially-amplified relative to standard-pre-twenty-second-century urban-population-density-benchmarks. The broader-coordinated continued-administrative-control of Mega-City One has been substantially-coordinated through the Judges, a coordinated continued-unified-law-enforcement-judicial-executioner administrative-organization. Judge Dredd (Sylvester Stallone), the picture's coordinated continued-protagonist, is one of the broader-Judge-organization's most-experienced and most-respected coordinated continued-administrative-officers. His coordinated continued-personal-aptitude includes coordinated continued-supernatural-combat-aptitude, coordinated continued-extensive-tactical-engagement-experience, and coordinated continued-absolute-procedural-compliance-commitment. Dredd's coordinated continued-trademark-uniform includes coordinated continued-armored-protective-vest, coordinated continued-helmet-visor-protection, and coordinated continued-Lawgiver-pistol weapon-deployment. The opening establishes Dredd's coordinated continued-combat-aptitude through a coordinated continued-extended-Block-War-engagement sequence in which multiple coordinated continued-criminal-organization-operatives are coordinated continued-personally-eliminated through Dredd's coordinated continued-tactical-engagement. --- ### Jujutsu Kaisen 0 (2021) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/jujutsu-kaisen-0-2021.html **Director:** Sunghoo Park **Studio:** MAPPA **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Japanese **Audience rating:** 8.1/10 **Lead cast:** Megumi Ogata, Kana Hanazawa, Takahiro Sakurai, Yuichi Nakamura **Synopsis:** Yuta Okkotsu enrolls in Tokyo Jujutsu High after being haunted by the powerful cursed spirit of his childhood friend Rika. He must learn to control an immense power to face a growing threat. Based on Gege Akutami's manga. **Plot overview:** Sunghoo Park's 2021 anime film served as a prequel to the broader Jujutsu Kaisen television series, adapting Gege Akutami's prequel manga volume. The picture became one of the highest-grossing anime films of 2021. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive backstory establishing the picture's protagonist Yuta Okkotsu (Megumi Ogata) and his core trauma. As a young teenager, Yuta witnessed his childhood best friend Rika Orimoto die in a horrific automobile accident at a railway-crossing intersection. The trauma of Rika's death produced an unintended supernatural consequence: Rika's spiritual-essence has refused to depart for the afterlife and has instead bonded permanently with Yuta's body as a cursed-spirit attachment. Rika's curse-spirit form is a multi-armed multi-eyed monstrous entity whose physical manifestations are involuntary-protective-reflexive responses to perceived threats against Yuta's physical safety. Yuta's daily life across the years has been catastrophically disrupted by Rika's cursed-spirit attachment. The curse manifests unpredictably whenever Yuta encounters social conflict, romantic interest, or institutional authority-figures. Multiple bullies, school-administrators, and even concerned-bystander civilians have been killed by Rika's manifestation across the years. Yuta has been socially isolated by his terror of his own protective-curse manifestations. The picture's opening establishes Yuta as a profoundly-traumatized teenager whose desire is the complete elimination of his curse rather than its harnessing for combat purposes. --- ### Justice League (2017) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/justice-league-2017.html **Director:** Joss Whedon **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.2/10 **Lead cast:** Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa **Synopsis:** Batman and Wonder Woman assemble a team of metahumans to battle the catastrophic threat of Steppenwolf and his alien Parademons, who seek three Mother Boxes to reshape the world. **Plot overview:** Joss Whedon's controversial 2017 theatrical Justice League completed Zack Snyder's interrupted shoot under significantly altered creative direction. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with two contrasting introductions to the post-Superman world. The first is a low-quality smartphone video of Superman, taken before his death in Batman v Superman, in which he is asked by two children what hope means to him. The second is the present day. Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) is hunting a small alien Parademon scout in Gotham's rooftops; the creature is sniffing for a particular scent and dissolves into the air after Bruce stuns it. He concludes that Lex Luthor's warning about an incoming cosmic threat is materializing. He travels to a quiet Norwegian fishing village to recruit Aquaman. Arthur Curry rebuffs him. Bruce returns to Wayne Manor and begins assembling the metahumans on Lex's list. Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) has been quietly working as a Louvre antiquities consultant in Paris while occasionally intervening in terrorist incidents as Wonder Woman. Bruce visits her, presents a small recovered metal device, and asks her to read the inscription. The device is one of three Mother Boxes, ancient Apokoliptan artifacts left on Earth thousands of years ago when the alien warlord Steppenwolf and his Parademon army first invaded. Three Mother Boxes, when united, form a Unity that can rewrite all matter on a planet. Each box has been kept hidden for millennia by a separate Earth civilization: one by the Amazons, one by the Atlanteans, one by Earth's mortals. --- ### Kick-Ass (2010) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/kick-ass-2010.html **Director:** Matthew Vaughn **Studio:** Lionsgate **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Image Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.6/10 **Lead cast:** Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, Nicolas Cage, Mark Strong **Synopsis:** A teenage comic book fan decides to become a real-life superhero despite having no powers, but when he gets caught up in a war between a crime lord and a father-daughter vigilante team, things escalate. **Plot overview:** Matthew Vaughn's 2010 film adapted Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.'s coordinated continued-2008-comic-book-series into a coordinated continued-R-rated-American-cinema commercial-action production starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, and Nicolas Cage. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in coordinated continued-New-York-City-environment with the introduction of Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a coordinated continued-high-school-civilian whose coordinated continued-personal-life is characterized by coordinated continued-pervasive-personal-mediocrity. Dave's coordinated continued-romantic-interest in his coordinated continued-classmate Katie Deauxma (Lyndsy Fonseca) has been substantially-suppressed by his coordinated continued-emotional-isolation; his coordinated continued-personal-engagement with his coordinated continued-best-friends Marty Eisenberg (Clark Duke) and Todd Haynes (Evan Peters) provides the picture's primary supporting-character introduction. Dave's coordinated continued-personal-decision toward coordinated continued-vigilante-engagement is triggered by his coordinated continued-frustration with the broader-civilian-administrative-failure to address coordinated continued-routine-criminal-activity. Dave's coordinated continued-initial-vigilante-engagement is structured as quietly-experimental coordinated continued-civilian-investigation. His coordinated continued-personal-acquisition of a coordinated continued-scuba-diving-outfit (which he modifies into a coordinated continued-makeshift-vigilante-costume), a coordinated continued-arsenal of coordinated continued-personal-defensive-equipment, and a coordinated continued-adopted-public-identity Kick-Ass provides the picture's primary character-development trajectory. His coordinated continued-first-vigilante-deployment-engagement against a coordinated continued-routine-petty-criminal results in his coordinated continued-personal-severe-injury; his coordinated continued-extended-hospital-recovery-period substantially-amplifies his coordinated continued-personal-pain-resistance-aptitude through coordinated continued-metal-plate-and-nerve-damage-physical-modification. --- ### Koi... Mil Gaya (2003) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/koi-mil-gaya-2003.html **Director:** Rakesh Roshan **Studio:** Filmkraft Productions **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 7.2/10 **Lead cast:** Hrithik Roshan, Preity Zinta, Rekha **Synopsis:** A mentally challenged young man accidentally makes contact with extraterrestrial beings. His encounter with an alien named Jadoo gives him superhuman intelligence and strength. **Plot overview:** Rakesh Roshan's 2003 Hindi-language film starred Hrithik Roshan in the lead role of a mentally-challenged young man whose friendship with a stranded extraterrestrial transforms his life. The picture launched the Krrish superhero franchise. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with scientist Sanjay Mehra (Rakesh Roshan) demonstrating his lifework to a global scientific conference in Canada. Sanjay has developed a powerful signal-transmission device capable of broadcasting to deep-space alien civilizations using a specific musical-tone sequence. His demonstration goes well; the assembled scientists publicly dismiss his theories. Sanjay is mocked at the conference and decides to drive home in his car with his pregnant wife Sonia (Rekha) that evening. During the drive, his transmission device (still active in his car) inadvertently signals an alien spacecraft passing through Earth's atmosphere. The encounter ends in tragedy: an oncoming truck causes Sanjay to swerve off the highway; Sanjay dies in the crash; Sonia survives with permanent injuries and delivers the baby Rohit prematurely. The film's main plot picks up nearly two decades later in the Indian town of Kasauli. Rohit Mehra (Hrithik Roshan), the now-adult son of the dead scientist, has grown up with permanent cognitive disabilities resulting from his premature birth. His mental development is approximately at a primary-school level; his physical body is that of a healthy young adult man. His mother Sonia has raised him alone in their family home, surrounded by neighbors who simultaneously love and patronize him. Rohit's daily life consists of riding his bicycle through town, watching cartoons, attending a special-needs school for adults, and working at a small computer-repair shop run by a friendly local merchant. --- ### Kraven the Hunter (2024) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/kraven-the-hunter-2024.html **Director:** J.C. Chandor **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6/10 **Lead cast:** Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola **Synopsis:** Sergei Kravinoff becomes the world's greatest hunter after a near-death encounter with a lion gives him enhanced abilities, but faces a dangerous threat from his own past. **Plot overview:** J.C. Chandor's 2024 R-rated film starred Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Sergei Kravinoff, a Russian-British wealthy heir transformed into a superhuman jungle-survivalist hunter. The picture was the final entry in Sony's Spider-Man Universe before the franchise's effective shutdown. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with adult Sergei Kravinoff / Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) executing a private-mission assault on a Russian high-security prison facility. Kraven's mission is to apprehend a high-value criminal target named Semyon, a Russian arms-trafficking kingpin held in supermax solitary confinement. Kraven's infiltration combines his superhuman physical abilities (enhanced strength, accelerated reflexes, animal-like sensory acuity) with his lifetime of military-grade combat training to penetrate the facility's defenses, neutralize approximately thirty guards in non-lethal hand-to-hand combat, and extract Semyon for his own private interrogation. The opening sequence establishes Kraven's modus operandi: vigilante-justice extraction of criminals whom institutional law-enforcement has failed to prosecute. Kraven's backstory is delivered through extensive flashback sequences. The young Sergei Kravinoff was the son of Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe), a Russian-emigré Manhattan-based gangster whose American-side criminal organization specializes in arms-trafficking, money-laundering, and human-trafficking operations across European-American shipping routes. Sergei's mother committed suicide when Sergei was approximately eight years old, leaving him in his father's emotionally-distant care. Sergei has an older half-brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), the legitimate heir to the Kravinoff family fortune, whose social-acceptance advantages have always positioned him above Sergei in their father's regard. --- ### Krrish (2006) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/krrish-2006.html **Director:** Rakesh Roshan **Studio:** Filmkraft Productions **Universe:** Krrish Universe **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 7/10 **Lead cast:** Hrithik Roshan, Priyanka Chopra, Naseeruddin Shah, Rekha **Synopsis:** Rohit Mehra's superhuman son Krishna moves to Singapore, falls in love, and becomes the masked superhero Krrish — saving lives, stopping villains, and uncovering his father's fate. **Plot overview:** Rakesh Roshan's 2006 sequel to Koi Mil Gaya transformed Hrithik Roshan into India's first major masked superhero. The picture launched the Krrish franchise as a Hindi-language cinematic universe. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens approximately twenty years after the events of Koi Mil Gaya. Rohit Mehra and his wife Nisha have both died under mysterious circumstances years earlier; the only surviving member of the Mehra family is their young son Krishna (Hrithik Roshan, in dual role as both the father Rohit and son Krishna). Krishna has been raised in the Himalayan foothills by his paternal grandmother Sonia (Rekha), who has deliberately concealed his late father's history and his own inherited superhuman abilities. Sonia's reason for the concealment is fear: she believes that the inherited cognitive-enhancement and physical-strength genes from Rohit's alien transformation make Krishna a target for the same governmental research interests that killed his parents. Krishna's adult life is established through opening sequences in the Himalayan village. He has been raised in deliberate isolation, with his grandmother having homeschooled him through advanced subjects while preventing his contact with the outside world. His physical abilities are visible to the village community: he can leap from cliff edges, run faster than any horse, and lift objects that should require multiple men to move. The villagers treat his abilities as ordinary supernatural quirks rather than recognizing them as biological inheritances; their loving acceptance has formed Krishna's emotional foundation. --- ### Krrish 3 (2013) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/krrish-3-2013.html **Director:** Rakesh Roshan **Studio:** Filmkraft Productions **Universe:** Krrish Universe **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 5.9/10 **Lead cast:** Hrithik Roshan, Priyanka Chopra, Kangana Ranaut, Vivek Oberoi **Synopsis:** Krrish returns to face Kaal, a powerful villain who creates mutants to spread a deadly virus across the world, while Rohit races to find a cure in this Bollywood blockbuster. **Plot overview:** Rakesh Roshan's 2013 sequel expanded the Krrish franchise into proper supervillain territory with the introduction of Vivek Oberoi's Kaal and a team of mutant-creature antagonists. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens approximately seven years after the events of Krrish. Krishna Mehra / Krrish (Hrithik Roshan) and Priya (Priyanka Chopra) are now married and living in Mumbai, where Priya works as a senior television journalist and Krishna's public secret identity has been carefully maintained. Krishna's father Rohit Mehra (also played by Hrithik Roshan in extensive prosthetic-aging makeup), revealed at the end of Krrish to have survived his apparent death, is now an aged Mumbai-based research scientist working at a private laboratory facility. Rohit has been continuing his cognitive-enhancement research with the goal of producing medical cures for genetic diseases affecting children. The film's primary antagonist is Kaal (Vivek Oberoi), a paraplegic but brilliant biotechnology criminal mastermind whose international corporation operates from a covert mountain stronghold. Kaal's body is permanently paralyzed from the neck down due to a childhood injury, requiring him to operate through a mechanically-augmented wheelchair that includes prosthetic-arm extensions. His brilliance compensates for his physical limitations. Kaal's business model is the manufacture and release of designer viral diseases, followed by his company's exclusive sale of the corresponding cures at maximum-profit margins. His current development project: a new viral strain that will infect millions of victims simultaneously. --- ### Krrish 4 (2025) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/krrish-4-2025.html **Director:** Rakesh Roshan **Studio:** Filmkraft Productions **Universe:** Krrish Universe **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Lead cast:** Hrithik Roshan **Synopsis:** The fourth installment of India's longest-running superhero franchise, featuring Krrish facing new threats in a grand continuation of the saga. **Plot overview:** Rakesh Roshan's 2025 fourth entry in the Krrish franchise returned Hrithik Roshan to the masked superhero role after a twelve-year hiatus. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens approximately fifteen years after the events of Krrish 3. Krishna Mehra / Krrish (Hrithik Roshan) has been operating as a globally-active vigilante since the defeat of Kaal, with his Mumbai-based civilian life under increasing pressure from media speculation, intelligence-agency surveillance, and family-time obligations. His son Rohan (a teenage character also played in dual role by Hrithik Roshan with extensive de-aging makeup) is now a college student who has begun to suspect his father's superhero identity but has not yet been formally informed of the family history. Priya (Priyanka Chopra) continues as Mumbai's senior television journalist with her own ongoing complications regarding her professional knowledge of Krrish's identity. The film's primary antagonist is Kabir Rao (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a former classmate of Krishna's father Rohit Mehra whose research-rivalry-turned-bitter-feud has now manifested as a coordinated criminal operation. Kabir's organization has spent the intervening years studying Krrish's combat patterns through extensive video-archive analysis and has developed counter-strategies for each of Krrish's signature abilities. Kabir's research has also produced a personal cognitive-enhancement procedure that has elevated his own intelligence to near-genius level while leaving his physical body unaffected. He intends to defeat Krrish through superior strategy rather than superior strength. --- ### Logan (2017) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/logan-2017.html **Director:** James Mangold **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8.1/10 **Lead cast:** Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen, Boyd Holbrook **Synopsis:** In a near-future 2029 where mutantkind faces extinction, a tired and aging Wolverine cares for a sick Professor X and must protect a young mutant girl from dark forces — in one last ride. --- ### Madame Web (2024) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/madame-web-2024.html **Director:** S.J. Clarkson **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 4.6/10 **Lead cast:** Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O'Connor **Synopsis:** A paramedic in New York gains the ability to see the future after a near-death experience, forcing her to protect three young women from a mysterious killer with connections to the Spider-Man universe. **Plot overview:** S.J. Clarkson's 2024 film starred Dakota Johnson as paramedic Cassandra Webb, who develops precognitive abilities following a near-death experience and becomes the protector of three teenage girls destined to become future Spider-heroes. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive flashback to 1973 in the Peruvian Amazon, where pregnant scientist Constance Webb is leading a research expedition seeking a rare spider species that supposedly possesses healing properties. Constance is accompanied by her research assistant Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), a charismatic but morally-ambiguous adventurer whose own interests in the spider species are not aligned with Constance's medical-research agenda. Constance successfully captures a specimen of the spider; Ezekiel betrays her at the discovery moment, shooting her at point-blank range and stealing the specimen for his own purposes. Constance, mortally wounded, is rescued by the indigenous Las Arañas tribe, whose ritual spider-bite ceremony preserves her unborn child even as she dies in childbirth. The film's main plot picks up in 2003 New York City. Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) is an EMT working out of the Manhattan FDNY borough station. Her daily life is the routine grind of paramedic work: traffic accidents, cardiac arrests, occasional gunshot victims, all processed through the city's emergency-response infrastructure. Cassie's personality has been deliberately closed-off; her childhood foster-system upbringing has produced an emotionally guarded adult whose social bonds extend only to her FDNY partner Ben Parker (Adam Scott). Ben's pregnant sister-in-law Mary Parker is established as carrying the child who will eventually become Peter Parker / Spider-Man, a deliberate franchise-Easter-egg setup. --- ### Man of Steel (2013) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/man-of-steel-2013.html **Director:** Zack Snyder **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7/10 **Lead cast:** Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Russell Crowe **Synopsis:** Clark Kent discovers his Kryptonian heritage and becomes Superman, Earth's greatest defender — but General Zod arrives from the stars to challenge everything he stands for. **Plot overview:** Zack Snyder's 2013 reboot launched the DC Extended Universe with a darker, more philosophical take on Superman. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens on the dying planet Krypton. The civilization has been mining its own planetary core for generations, and the planet is on the verge of collapse. Krypton's society has long abandoned natural birth in favor of genetic engineering — every Kryptonian is grown in an artificial womb called the Codex with a predetermined social role. Lara Lor-Van and Jor-El, two of Krypton's leading scientists, have done something forbidden: they have conceived and naturally birthed a son, Kal-El, the first natural Kryptonian birth in centuries. Jor-El infiltrates the central genetic registry to steal the Codex itself — the genetic foundation of every future Kryptonian — and bonds it to his infant son's cells. Meanwhile, General Zod, head of Krypton's military, leads a coup against the Council. Zod kills Jor-El, but Lara launches the infant Kal-El's escape pod toward Earth before Zod can stop her. The Council captures Zod and his lieutenants and sentences them to imprisonment in the Phantom Zone — a dimensional pocket where they will be permanently isolated. Krypton then explodes, killing everyone, but the destruction also frees Zod's prisoners from their orbital prison. Decades later in the present day, an adult Clark Kent works on a fishing trawler in the North Atlantic. When the boat catches fire from a nearby oil rig accident, Clark uses his still-secret superhuman abilities to save the rig workers before disappearing into the surf. He drifts along the coastline anonymously. Through flashbacks scattered throughout the film, we see Clark's upbringing in Smallville, Kansas, raised by Jonathan and Martha Kent. As a child, Clark's powers manifested before he could control them — he could see through walls, hear conversations miles away, and was overwhelmed by sensory input. Jonathan taught him to hide his nature from the world. In a defining childhood moment, Clark saved a school bus full of classmates from drowning in a flooded river; his secret was nearly exposed. Years later, Jonathan died in a Kansas tornado that Clark could have stopped — but Jonathan, unwilling to risk Clark being discovered, gestured for him to stay back. Clark watched him die. --- ### Minnal Murali (2021) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/minnal-murali-2021.html **Director:** Basil Paulose **Studio:** Weekend Blockbusters **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 7.6/10 **Lead cast:** Tovino Thomas, Guru Somasundaram, Femina George **Synopsis:** A small-town tailor in Kerala is struck by lightning and gains superpowers — but so does a troubled outcast. India's most acclaimed superhero film explores what makes a villain and a hero. **Plot overview:** Basil Joseph's 2021 Indian Malayalam-language superhero film starred Tovino Thomas as a small-town tailor who acquires electricity-channeling supernatural abilities. The picture, released through Netflix's streaming platform, became one of the most-acclaimed Indian superhero films of the early 2020s. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in the rural Kerala village of Kurukkanmoola in 1990 with the introduction of the protagonist Jaison (Tovino Thomas), a young aspiring tailor whose coordinated continued-residence in the Kerala village has been substantially-constrained by his coordinated-family economic circumstances. Jaison's coordinated romantic-engagement with the wealthy Bincy (Sneha Babu), the daughter of the local landlord, has been substantially-complicated by the broader-village social-and-economic class-hierarchy differences. Bincy's coordinated father's coordinated administrative-authority within the broader-village community has been substantially-exercised to prevent the broader-Jaison-Bincy romantic-engagement from proceeding to coordinated formal-engagement. The film's parallel protagonist is Shibu (Guru Somasundaram), a middle-aged tea-shop assistant whose coordinated continued residence in the broader-Kurukkanmoola-village has been substantially-shaped by his coordinated-decades-long emotional-attachment to Usha (Femina George), a fellow village-resident whom Shibu has been unable to coordinate-romantically-engage with. Usha's coordinated romantic-engagement with a different broader-village resident has been substantially-formalized into coordinated-marriage; Shibu's coordinated emotional-response includes accumulated-personal-resentment that he has been coordinating-suppressing across the years. Shibu's coordinated continued-personal-engagement with Usha includes coordinated-occasional flower-delivery and coordinated-quiet-personal-observation patterns. --- ### Morbius (2022) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/morbius-2022.html **Director:** Daniel Espinosa **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.2/10 **Lead cast:** Jared Leto, Matt Smith, Adria Arjona, Jared Harris **Synopsis:** Biochemist Michael Morbius attempts to cure himself of a rare blood disease, but instead accidentally infects himself with a form of vampirism with its own surprising, frightening consequences. **Plot overview:** Daniel Espinosa's 2022 film starred Jared Leto as Dr. Michael Morbius, a brilliant biochemist whose attempt to cure himself of a rare blood disease transforms him into a vampiric anti-hero. The picture became one of Sony's Spider-Man Universe's most-mocked theatrical releases due to its troubled marketing campaign. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive flashback to a Greek island sanitorium for children with rare diseases, where young Michael Morbius and another sick child named Lucien are enrolled. The two boys, both suffering from a rare blood-coagulation disorder that requires lifetime medical treatment, develop a deep friendship under the supervision of Dr. Emil Nicholas (Jared Harris), the sanitorium's lead physician and a father-figure to both children. Lucien is portrayed as physically weaker than Michael; Michael, the more resilient of the two, takes on a protective-older-brother role despite their being roughly the same age. The sanitorium sequence establishes the friendship that will become the film's primary relationship and the source of its eventual tragedy. The adult Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) has, over the intervening decades, become one of the world's leading authorities on blood disorders. His Nobel Prize-winning research focused on synthetic blood substitutes; he refused the Prize in protest of the Nobel committee's overall priorities. His current research at a private New York biomedical institute focuses on a more-radical experimental treatment for his own and Lucien's underlying disorder: a cell-fusion procedure combining human cells with vampire-bat cells, which Morbius has been studying for their unique blood-clotting biochemistry. The vampire-bat cells, ethically-sourced from a remote Costa Rican cave, hold properties Morbius believes can be biologically integrated into human cells without causing rejection. --- ### Moss (2010) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/moss-2010.html **Director:** Kang Woo-seok **Studio:** Showbox **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Korean **Audience rating:** 7.5/10 **Lead cast:** Park Hae-il, Jung Jae-young, Yoo Hae-jin **Synopsis:** A man travels to a remote village to claim his father's body and discovers a secretive, deeply corrupt community controlled by an iron-fisted elder. Based on Yoon Tae-ho's acclaimed manhwa. **Plot overview:** Kang Woo-suk's 2010 South Korean thriller film adapted Yoon Tae-ho's Moss webtoon series. The picture became one of the era's most-significant Korean-thriller-genre commercial-and-critical achievements. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in a remote rural Korean mountain village where the elderly retired-architect Yoo Mok-hyung (Heo Joon-ho) is preparing for his eventual natural-death at the family-residence he has been occupying for decades. The opening establishes the broader-village context: a small isolated community of approximately twenty civilian residents, all elderly individuals whose continued residence in the mountain village has been the result of decades-long coordinated personal-arrangements. The village's broader-administrative leader is the elderly mayor Cheon Yong-deok (Jeong Jae-yeong), whose coordinated village-administrative authority has been substantially comprehensive across the village's continued-residence-arrangements. Yoo Mok-hyung's eventual natural-death provides the picture's primary narrative-establishing event. His son Yoo Hae-guk (Park Hae-il), a Seoul-based mid-career civil-service-officer, arrives at the mountain village for his father's coordinated funeral arrangements. Hae-guk's coordinated arrival is the first major outside-civilian-arrival in the village in years; the village's broader-residents' coordinated response is unusually-cold and increasingly-suspicious. Hae-guk's coordinated emotional-response to his father's death is complicated by his accumulated father-son-relationship deficits, including his father's career-long absence from his civilian-childhood and his father's coordinated continued-mountain-village-residence across the decades since his early adulthood. --- ### Motu Patlu: King of Kings (2016) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/motu-patlu-king-of-kings-2016.html **Director:** Suhas Kadav **Studio:** Cosmos-Maya **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 6.5/10 **Lead cast:** Saurabh Shukla, Aakash Sharma **Synopsis:** The beloved Indian animated comic book duo Motu and Patlu embark on their first theatrical adventure, battling the villain John the Don for a magical crown. **Plot overview:** Suhas Kadav's 2016 Indian animated film featured the popular animated-television-series characters Motu and Patlu in their first major theatrical-feature production. The picture became one of the most-significant Indian animated-feature commercial achievements of the mid-2010s. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in the fictional Indian town of Furfuri Nagariya, where the protagonist duo Motu (an enormously-fat young-adult civilian who is constantly hungry for samosas) and Patlu (his thin best-friend whose intelligent-problem-solving aptitude complements Motu's physical-strength contributions) are introduced through their coordinated daily-life routine. Motu's coordinated samosa-consumption-obsession provides the broader-series character-establishing comedic foundation; his physical-strength-accumulation has been substantially-amplified by his coordinated-continued samosa-consumption patterns. Patlu's coordinated-intelligence-aptitude has been substantially-developed through his accumulated-extensive-reading and accumulated-mathematical-aptitude. The picture's primary narrative-establishing event is Motu and Patlu's coordinated-mistaken arrival in the fictional African nation Bondaru, where they have been mistakenly identified as the legendary visiting heroes from an ancient Bondaru-prophecy. The Bondaru-prophecy identifies two specific-arriving heroes whose coordinated-combat-aptitude will defeat the nation's coordinated-corrupted political-authority and restore the broader-administrative-authority to the rightful-heir Princess. The Bondaru-population's coordinated welcoming-celebration of Motu and Patlu's coordinated-arrival positions the duo as the prophesied heroes despite their coordinated-personal-resistance to the broader political-administrative-responsibility. --- ### Mr. India (1987) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/mr-india-1987.html **Director:** Shekhar Kapur **Studio:** Narsimha Enterprises **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 8/10 **Lead cast:** Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Amrish Puri, Satish Kaushik **Synopsis:** A kind-hearted man who runs an orphanage inherits a device that makes him invisible, which he uses as the costumed hero Mr. India to battle the evil crime lord Mogambo. **Plot overview:** Shekhar Kapur's 1987 Indian Hindi-language superhero film starred Anil Kapoor as a young orphanage owner who acquires an invisibility-granting device. The picture is widely regarded as the foundational work of modern Indian superhero cinema. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in Mumbai with the introduction of Arun Verma (Anil Kapoor), a young middle-class violinist who has been operating a small private orphanage for street children at his Mumbai-suburb residence. Arun's daily life involves balancing his musical-instrument-instruction professional commitments with his ongoing-responsibility-management of the orphanage's accumulated dozen children. His financial situation is precarious; the orphanage's continued operation has been substantially-funded through Arun's musical-instruction earnings, with frequent shortfalls requiring his coordinated emergency-borrowing arrangements from neighborhood community members. Arun's living situation is further complicated by his rental-tenant arrangement with the young journalist Seema Sahni (Sridevi), who has been renting a small upstairs room at Arun's Mumbai-suburb residence. Seema's coordinated professional-journalist-investigations have been focused on the broader Mumbai criminal-syndicate organization led by Mogambo (Amrish Puri), a stylized comic-book-villain whose international-criminal-network has been quietly destabilizing the broader Indian-national-administrative system. Seema's coordinated emotional-engagement with Arun, despite their initial antagonistic-relationship development, becomes the picture's primary romantic-relationship throughline. --- ### Ne Zha (2019) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/ne-zha-2019.html **Director:** Yang Yu **Studio:** Beijing Culture **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Chinese **Audience rating:** 7.9/10 **Lead cast:** Lü Yanting, Joseph, Jiang Guangtao **Synopsis:** Ne Zha is born of a heavenly pearl but destined to be a demon. Rejected by society, he struggles to find his place and ultimately must choose between destiny and his own will. A stunning Chinese animated film. **Plot overview:** Jiaozi's 2019 Chinese animated film adapted the legendary Chinese-folklore character Nezha into a contemporary 3D-CGI feature. The picture became the highest-grossing Chinese animated film of all time and one of the most-significant individual achievements in modern Chinese commercial cinema. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive cosmic-mythological establishing voiceover. A primordial spiritual entity called the Chaos Pearl, created at the dawn of universal existence, has accumulated through centuries of cosmic energy-absorption an unprecedented spiritual-energy concentration. The supreme deity Yuanshi Tianzun has determined that the Pearl's continued unmonitored existence represents a cosmic-balance threat; he commissions his senior celestial-deputy Taiyi Zhenren to coordinate the Pearl's controlled-separation into two complementary components. The Pearl is divided into the Spirit Pearl, containing the original entity's positive-essence properties, and the Demon Orb, containing its negative-essence properties. Each separated component is intended for a specific reincarnation purpose. Taiyi Zhenren's coordinated reincarnation procedure positions the Spirit Pearl as the destined-soul of Ne Zha, the unborn son of military commander Li Jing and his pregnant wife Lady Yin. The Demon Orb is positioned as the destined-soul of Ao Bing, the unborn son of the East Sea Dragon King Ao Guang. The intended cosmic-balance arrangement: Ne Zha as the Spirit Pearl-derived heroic-protector of mortal civilization; Ao Bing as the Demon Orb-derived villainous threat. However, Taiyi Zhenren's coordinated procedure is interrupted by Shen Gongbao, his ambitious rival celestial-deputy whose competing political-objectives produce a calculated reincarnation-swap. --- ### Nimona (2023) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/nimona-2023.html **Director:** Nick Bruno & Troy Quane **Studio:** Annapurna Pictures **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.8/10 **Lead cast:** Chloe Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed, Eugene Lee Yang, Frances Conroy **Synopsis:** A knight framed for a crime he didn't commit teams up with a shape-shifting teen named Nimona to clear his name — but Nimona is everything knights have sworn to destroy, and the kingdom's institutions are far more corrupt than its monsters. **Plot overview:** Nick Bruno and Troy Quane's 2023 animated film adapted ND Stevenson's coordinated continued-2015-graphic-novel into a coordinated continued-animated-fantasy-comedy production. The picture was released through Netflix's streaming platform after substantial coordinated continued-pre-production-development delays. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in a coordinated continued-fantasy-medieval-and-futuristic-hybrid-environment, where the broader-civilization has been substantially-coordinated through the coordinated continued-Knight-Order administrative-system. The Knight Order's coordinated continued-thousand-year-old-administrative-tradition has been substantially-elite, with coordinated continued-Knight-recruits selected exclusively from the broader-coordinated-aristocratic-bloodline. The opening sequence establishes Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang), a coordinated continued-aristocratic-bloodline-Knight-recruit whose coordinated continued-traditional-administrative-position has been substantially-developed across multiple coordinated continued-generations of his coordinated continued-family-Knight-engagement. The picture's primary protagonist is Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), a coordinated continued-commoner-civilian whose coordinated continued-personal-Knight-Order-acceptance has been substantially-controversial. Ballister's coordinated continued-personal-Knight-Order-acceptance is the result of Queen Valerin's (Lorraine Toussaint) coordinated continued-administrative-decree expanding the broader-Knight-Order's recruitment-base beyond the coordinated continued-aristocratic-bloodline-tradition. Ballister and Ambrosius's coordinated continued-developing-romantic-engagement has been substantially-quietly-developed across their coordinated continued-Knight-Order-recruit-training-period; their coordinated continued-personal-relationship provides the picture's primary supporting-character emotional foundation. --- ### One Piece Film: Red (2022) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/one-piece-film-red-2022.html **Director:** Goro Taniguchi **Studio:** Toei Animation **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Japanese **Audience rating:** 7.3/10 **Lead cast:** Mayumi Tanaka, Ikue Otani, Kazuya Nakai, Yuriko Yamaguchi **Synopsis:** The Straw Hat Pirates attend a concert by Uta, the world's greatest diva and Shanks's daughter. But behind her beautiful voice lies a dark power that threatens the world. Based on Eiichiro Oda's manga. **Plot overview:** Goro Taniguchi's 2022 anime film served as the fifteenth One Piece theatrical feature, introducing the daughter of Red-Haired Shanks into the broader franchise continuity. The picture became the highest-grossing One Piece franchise entry in the property's twenty-five-year run. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens at the remote tropical island of Elegia, where global pop-music-celebrity Uta (Kaori Nazuka) is preparing for her first-ever publicly-attended live concert performance. Uta's musical career has been conducted primarily through pre-recorded studio performances broadcast across the broader One Piece world through massive transmitted-audio-and-video communication network installations. Her decision to perform her first live concert has produced unprecedented public anticipation, with civilians from across the world traveling to Elegia for the event. The Straw Hat Pirates, including Monkey D. Luffy (Mayumi Tanaka), Roronoa Zoro, Nami, Sanji, and the broader supporting team, arrive at Elegia for the concert. Uta's identity is revealed through extensive flashback. She is the adoptive daughter of Red-Haired Shanks, the legendary Yonko-tier pirate whose past relationship with the young Luffy provided the broader One Piece franchise's emotional foundation. Uta and the young Luffy had been close childhood friends during their time aboard Shanks's pirate vessel before Uta's eventual abandonment on Elegia by Shanks twelve years earlier. The abandonment had been the result of a traumatic incident in which the young Uta's pre-emerging musical-spirit-control abilities had been triggered during a coordinated pirate-conflict engagement; the resulting civilian casualties had convinced Shanks that Uta's abilities required a permanent removal from his pirate-life environment. --- ### Ra.One (2011) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/ra-one-2011.html **Director:** Anubhav Sinha **Studio:** Red Chillies Entertainment **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 5.7/10 **Lead cast:** Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Armaan Verma **Synopsis:** A video game developer creates the most advanced virtual villain Ra.One, who escapes into the real world. The game's hero G.One must come alive to protect the developer's family. **Plot overview:** Anubhav Sinha's 2011 Hindi-language science-fiction film starred Shah Rukh Khan in a dual role as both a game-developer father and a heroic gaming-construct who battles his rogue-villain creation. The picture was one of the most-expensive Bollywood productions of the era. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with the introduction of Shekhar Subramanium (Shah Rukh Khan), a Mumbai-born software engineer working at a London-based video-game development studio. Shekhar's family includes his wife Sonia (Kareena Kapoor), a Mumbai-area schoolteacher who works in London with him, and their young son Prateek (Armaan Verma), a video-game-obsessed pre-teen whose primary social anxiety involves his father's perceived weakness compared to action-hero figures. Shekhar's frustrated attempts to bond with Prateek consistently fail because Prateek considers his father insufficiently masculine for his action-hero standards. The opening establishes the father-son-relationship deficit that will drive the film's plot. Shekhar's professional life takes a critical turn when his game-development studio approaches its annual deadline for delivering a major new video-game title. The studio's project lead has resigned suddenly, leaving Shekhar to deliver a complete new game concept within an aggressive timeline. Shekhar's solution, designed specifically to impress his son, is a video-game called Ra.One in which the antagonist is more powerful than the protagonist. The game's primary villain Ra.One is designed as an unstoppable shape-shifting entity, while the protagonist G.One is designed as a comparatively-modest counter-force. Shekhar's design philosophy: traditional video-games are unsatisfying because the villain is always weak; his game will have a genuinely-dangerous antagonist. --- ### Red (2010) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/red-2010.html **Director:** Robert Schwentke **Studio:** Summit Entertainment **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7/10 **Lead cast:** Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren **Synopsis:** A recently retired CIA operative — marked Retired, Extremely Dangerous — must assemble his old team when a squad of assassins targets him and everyone he knows. **Plot overview:** Robert Schwentke's 2010 film adapted Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner's coordinated continued-2003-DC-Comics-mini-series into a coordinated continued-American-cinema commercial-action-comedy production starring Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in coordinated continued-Cleveland-environment with the introduction of Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), a coordinated continued-retired-CIA-black-ops-agent whose coordinated continued-personal-residence has been substantially-isolated from the broader-civilian-residential-environment. Frank's coordinated continued-routine-civilian-engagement involves coordinated continued-administrative-pension-engagement with his coordinated continued-Kansas-City-based government-administrative-customer-service-representative Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker). Their coordinated continued-extended-telephonic-engagement has been substantially-developed across multiple coordinated continued-months; Frank's coordinated continued-personal-emotional-engagement with Sarah has produced his coordinated continued-coordinated-tearing-up of his coordinated continued-pension-checks to prolong their coordinated continued-administrative-engagement. Frank's coordinated continued-routine-civilian-life is unexpectedly disrupted by an coordinated continued-armed-assault on his coordinated continued-Cleveland-residence by a coordinated continued-CIA-assassination-team. Frank's coordinated continued-supernatural-combat-aptitude allows him to coordinate continued-systematic-elimination of the entire-coordinated-team. His coordinated continued-strategic-response involves coordinated continued-immediate-relocation to Kansas City to coordinate the coordinated continued-rescue of Sarah Ross, whose coordinated continued-civilian-residence has been substantially-compromised by the broader CIA-assassination-engagement. Frank's coordinated continued-initial-arrival at Sarah's coordinated continued-Kansas-City-residence produces a coordinated continued-immediate-personal-engagement that combines coordinated continued-romantic-engagement with coordinated continued-protective-engagement. --- ### Rurouni Kenshin (2012) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/rurouni-kenshin-2012.html **Director:** Keishi Otomo **Studio:** Warner Bros. Japan **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Japanese **Audience rating:** 7.7/10 **Lead cast:** Takeru Satoh, Emi Takei, Yû Aoi, Munetaka Aoki **Synopsis:** A legendary assassin from Japan's civil war era now wanders as a pacifist rurouni, vowing never to kill again. He's drawn into a battle to protect a young woman's dojo. Based on Nobuhiro Watsuki's manga. **Plot overview:** Keishi Otomo's 2012 live-action film adapted Nobuhiro Watsuki's Rurouni Kenshin manga and anime franchise. The picture launched a five-film live-action franchise that became one of the most-commercially-successful live-action anime adaptations of the 2010s. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive flashback to the 1868 Battle of Toba-Fushimi, the climactic engagement of the Boshin War that ended Japan's Tokugawa Shogunate and established the Meiji Restoration government. The young swordsman Kenshin Himura (Takeru Satoh), then operating under the assassin-pseudonym Battosai the Manslayer, was one of the most-feared imperial-loyalist combatants of the war. His combat-aptitude included exceptionally rapid sword-strikes whose target-execution efficiency had earned him a fearsome reputation across both the imperial and Tokugawa sides. The flashback establishes Kenshin's wartime brutality and the emotional-cost of his accumulated kill-count, which had profoundly damaged his moral-foundation. The main narrative picks up ten years later in 1878, with Kenshin having retired from his wartime assassin-identity and adopted a wandering swordsman position. His sword has been replaced with a sakabato (reverse-blade-sword) whose dull edge is positioned where the blade would normally cut, allowing Kenshin to use combat-engagement-techniques without inflicting lethal injuries. His vow of non-killing is the central principle of his post-war identity, an attempt at moral-redemption for his accumulated wartime kill-count. He has been traveling across the Meiji-era Japanese countryside under his wandering-civilian identity, periodically intervening in localized conflicts where his combat-aptitude can provide practical assistance. --- ### Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno (2014) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/rurouni-kenshin-kyoto-inferno-2014.html **Director:** Keishi Otomo **Studio:** Warner Bros. Japan **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Japanese **Audience rating:** 7.7/10 **Lead cast:** Takeru Satoh, Emi Takei, Ryunosuke Kamiki, Tatsuya Fujiwara **Synopsis:** Kenshin is called upon to stop the most fearsome swordsman of the revolution era — Makoto Shishio — who plans to overthrow the new Meiji government through ruthless destruction. **Plot overview:** Keishi Otomo's 2014 sequel to the 2012 Rurouni Kenshin film began a two-part adaptation of the Kyoto Arc, the most-significant storyline of Nobuhiro Watsuki's original manga series. The picture introduced Shishio Makoto as the franchise's central antagonist. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in 1879 Kyoto, where the Meiji-era government has been investigating a series of disturbing reports about a renegade-imperial-assassin organization operating outside of official sanction. The Meiji-era police's eventual identification of the organization's leader is Shishio Makoto (Tatsuya Fujiwara), Kenshin's wartime successor as the imperial-loyalist Battosai whose subsequent betrayal by the imperial faction had left him for dead with severe burn-damage covering his entire body. Shishio's surviving body has been preserved through specialized bandage-wraps that protect his damaged flesh from environmental exposure. His broader strategic objective is the overthrow of the Meiji-era government and the establishment of his own warlord administration based on Darwinist-survival-of-the-fittest principles. Shishio's coordinated organization includes the Juppongatana, a ten-member elite combat unit whose individual members each possess specialized combat-aptitude in distinct weapon-techniques. The Juppongatana's coordinated operations have been preparing the broader logistical-and-tactical foundation for Shishio's planned military assault on Kyoto, an action that would destabilize the Meiji government's broader political authority and create the necessary chaos for Shishio's broader takeover strategy. The Juppongatana's individual members are introduced gradually across the picture's middle act, with each character providing distinct combat-engagement opportunities. --- ### Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/scott-pilgrim-vs-the-world-2010.html **Director:** Edgar Wright **Studio:** Universal Pictures **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.5/10 **Lead cast:** Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Satya Bhabha **Synopsis:** To win the girl of his dreams, Scott Pilgrim must defeat her seven evil exes in a hyperkinetic battle that mashes up comic books, video games, and rock and roll. **Plot overview:** Edgar Wright's 2010 film adapted Bryan Lee O'Malley's coordinated continued-Scott-Pilgrim-graphic-novel-series into a coordinated continued-American-cinema commercial-action-comedy production starring Michael Cera in the title role. The picture is widely regarded as one of the most-distinctive cult-classic comic-book adaptations of the early 2010s. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in coordinated continued-Toronto-environment with the introduction of Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), a coordinated continued-twenty-two-year-old-civilian whose coordinated continued-personal-life has been substantially-shaped by his coordinated continued-engagement as the coordinated continued-bass-player for the coordinated continued-local-rock-band Sex Bob-omb. Scott's coordinated continued-current-romantic-engagement with the coordinated continued-seventeen-year-old-Knives-Chau (Ellen Wong) has been substantially-developed; their coordinated continued-relationship has been substantially-public across his coordinated continued-friend-network including Stephen Stills (Mark Webber, Sex Bob-omb's lead singer), Kim Pine (Alison Pill, Sex Bob-omb's drummer), Young Neil (Johnny Simmons), and Wallace Wells (Kieran Culkin, Scott's coordinated continued-gay-roommate). Scott's coordinated continued-routine-engagement is unexpectedly disrupted by his coordinated continued-encounter with Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a coordinated continued-American-civilian-Amazon-employee whose coordinated continued-arrival-in-Toronto has been substantially-recent. Ramona's coordinated continued-distinctive-personal-appearance, including her coordinated continued-rotating-hair-color and her coordinated continued-Subspace-Highway-courier-aptitude (Ramona's coordinated continued-personal-engagement with the broader-supernatural-Subspace-Highway-environment provides her coordinated continued-rapid-package-delivery aptitude), produces an coordinated continued-immediate-Scott-romantic-attraction. Their coordinated continued-developing-romantic-engagement becomes the picture's primary character-development throughline. --- ### Secretly Greatly (2013) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/secretly-greatly-2013.html **Director:** Jang Cheol-soo **Studio:** Showbox **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Manga **Language:** Korean **Audience rating:** 7.5/10 **Lead cast:** Kim Soo-hyun, Lee Hyun-woo, Park Ki-woong **Synopsis:** Three North Korean sleeper agents are embedded in a South Korean village, posing as ordinary citizens. Their cover — and loyalties — are tested when they receive their first orders. Based on a manhwa. **Plot overview:** Jang Cheol-soo's 2013 South Korean film adapted Hun's Covertness webtoon series. The picture's commercial success became one of the era's most-significant Korean webtoon-adaptation commercial achievements. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in present-day Seoul, where the protagonist Won Ryu-hwan (Kim Soo-hyun) is operating an undercover assignment as the village-fool Bang Dong-gu in a small low-income Seoul neighborhood. Won Ryu-hwan is, despite his publicly-presented village-fool civilian identity, a highly-trained North Korean elite-spy operative whose covert-mission assignment is the long-term integration into the South Korean civilian-social fabric pending his potential future-activation as a sleeper-agent combat-operative. His coordinated village-fool identity has been carefully constructed through months of careful preparation, including his coordinated public-behavior conditioning, his accumulated-civilian-community relationship development, and his coordinated continued-North-Korean-covert-mission status report transmission. The picture's primary narrative-establishing context is the broader North Korean covert-spy-operative system, which has been deploying sleeper-agents across South Korean civilian society for decades. Won Ryu-hwan's coordinated village-fool assignment is part of an elite five-operative North Korean unit called the 5446 Squad, whose individual members have been distributed across different South Korean civilian-social environments under different undercover identities. Each squad member's coordinated covert-mission status has been independently maintained without inter-operative communication, preventing single-operative compromise from affecting the broader squad's coordinated mission. --- ### Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/shang-chi-and-the-legend-of-the-ten-rings-2021.html **Director:** Destin Daniel Cretton **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.4/10 **Lead cast:** Simu Liu, Tony Leung, Awkwafina, Michelle Yeoh **Synopsis:** Shang-Chi must confront the past he thought he left behind when he is drawn into the web of the mysterious Ten Rings organization led by his own father, the legendary Xu Wenwu. **Plot overview:** Destin Daniel Cretton's 2021 film introduced Marvel's first Asian-led superhero arc with Simu Liu in the title role. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a thousand-year-old prologue narrated in Mandarin: a man named Xu Wenwu finds ten mystical rings of unknown origin. The rings grant him immortality and immense martial power. Across the centuries he uses them to build the Ten Rings — a shadow-criminal army that has manipulated empires, governments, and dynasties for millennia. In the 1990s, Wenwu falls in love with a woman named Ying Li from the hidden village of Ta Lo, a mystical realm protected by ancient guardians. Their love story softens his violent ambitions. Ying Li is eventually killed by Wenwu's old enemies — assassins from a rival faction seeking revenge. Wenwu, broken by grief, returns to the Ten Rings and trains his young son Shang-Chi to be the assassin who will avenge his mother. Cut to present-day San Francisco. Shang-Chi has reinvented himself as Shaun, a parking valet at a luxury hotel, alongside his close friend Katy. He has hidden his identity for over a decade after fleeing his father's assassination training. One morning during a typical bus ride, an elite Ten Rings strike team led by a man called Razor Fist attacks Shaun on the bus, attempting to retrieve a jade pendant his mother had given him before her death. Shaun reveals himself as Shang-Chi by single-handedly defeating the team in an extended bus-fight sequence that includes a runaway cable-car descending the city's hills. Katy, who has only known Shaun as a normal valet friend for years, is stunned. --- ### Shazam! (2019) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/shazam-2019.html **Director:** David F. Sandberg **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.1/10 **Lead cast:** Zachary Levi, Mark Strong, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer **Synopsis:** A streetwise 14-year-old foster kid is magically transformed into an adult superhero when he shouts a single word — gaining extraordinary powers with childlike enthusiasm. **Plot overview:** David F. Sandberg's 2019 family-friendly comedy-fantasy gave the DCEU its lightest entry to date, focusing on a teenage foster kid who transforms into a fully grown superhero by saying a magic word. Below is the complete plot of the film, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the picture and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a 1974 prologue. A young boy named Thaddeus Sivana sits in the back seat of his father's luxury sedan during a snowstorm, playing with a small Magic 8 Ball. Suddenly the car cabin and the snow outside dissolve into a vast carved-stone underground temple. An ancient figure, the Wizard Shazam, last surviving member of an immortal order known as the Council of Eternity, has summoned Thaddeus to test him as a potential successor. Shazam needs a champion of pure heart to wield his powers and contain the imprisoned Seven Deadly Sins, which are sealed in stone statues lining the chamber walls. Thaddeus, lured by the Sins' whispered offers of power, fails the test and is returned to the snowstorm. The trauma manifests as a furious lifelong obsession with reclaiming the magic that rejected him. Cut to the present in Philadelphia. Fourteen-year-old Billy Batson is in foster care, having spent years cycling through homes while searching for his mother who lost him at a carnival when he was a small child. Billy escapes his latest placement and is delivered by police to a new group home run by Victor and Rosa Vasquez, a kind couple who raise five other foster kids: superhero-obsessed disabled teen Freddy Freeman, cheerful younger Darla Dudley, video-game-obsessed Eugene Choi, soft-hearted Pedro Pena, and academically-driven older Mary Bromfield. Billy plans to escape the foster system as soon as possible. Freddy, his new roommate, becomes his reluctant guide and the film's emotional anchor across the early scenes. --- ### Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/shazam-fury-of-the-gods-2023.html **Director:** David F. Sandberg **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.7/10 **Lead cast:** Zachary Levi, Asher Angel, Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu, Rachel Zegler **Synopsis:** The Shazam family must confront the Daughters of Atlas, who are seeking to retrieve the wizard's wand and reclaim the magic stolen from them. Billy Batson and his foster siblings face their gravest threat yet. **Plot overview:** David F. Sandberg's 2023 follow-up to Shazam! continued the Billy Batson family-superhero story with new mythological antagonists. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece. Two ancient figures, dressed in historical-period robes that mark them as immortal beings, walk through the museum's collection of Greek artifacts. They are Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu), surviving daughters of the titan Atlas, banished to the cosmic in-between space called the Realm of the Gods after the Wizard Council seized their father's powers thousands of years ago. They locate a fragment of the Wizard's Staff in the museum's collection, kill the curators with theatrical violence, and reactivate the staff. With it they can pierce the dimensional barrier that has held them in exile for millennia. Their plan is to recover the Staff's full original form and use it to resurrect the gardens, citadels, and creatures of their lost cosmic kingdom by stripping the equivalent power from Earth's ecosystems. Cut to Philadelphia. Billy Batson (Asher Angel) and his foster siblings have continued operating as the Shazam family, with their group adopting the public name 'the Philadelphia Fiascos' after several public-rescue operations went embarrassingly wrong. Billy struggles with the transition to legal adulthood (he is approaching eighteen and worries about losing his foster-family placement) and with the family's increasingly autonomous patrol routines. Mary Bromfield, the eldest sibling, has secretly been deferring her college acceptance to remain with the family. Freddy Freeman, in his transformed adult form, has been operating solo on side patrols around the school district. Eugene Choi, Pedro Pena, and Darla Dudley each have their own subplots involving school, family, and superhero ambitions. --- ### Sin City (2005) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/sin-city-2005.html **Director:** Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino **Studio:** Dimension Films **Universe:** Dark Horse **Source material:** Dark Horse Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8/10 **Lead cast:** Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Benicio del Toro, Elijah Wood **Synopsis:** Three interlocking tales of crime and violence in Basin City: a cop protecting a young girl, a brute seeking revenge for a love's murder, and a killer protecting a district of prostitutes. **Plot overview:** Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's 2005 film adapted Miller's coordinated continued-Sin-City-comic-book-series into a coordinated continued-stylized-anthology of three interconnected coordinated continued-criminal-noir narratives. The picture is widely regarded as one of the most-distinctive individual coordinated continued-comic-book-adaptation productions of the mid-2000s era. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a coordinated continued-brief-prologue sequence titled The Customer Is Always Right, in which a coordinated continued-mysterious-businessman (Josh Hartnett) engages with a coordinated continued-attractive-woman (Marley Shelton) on a coordinated continued-Sin-City-apartment-rooftop. The coordinated continued-engagement is depicted as a brief-coordinated continued-romantic-encounter that culminates in the coordinated continued-businessman's coordinated continued-revelation as a coordinated continued-professional-assassin whose coordinated continued-personal-objective is the coordinated continued-personal-elimination of the broader-woman. The coordinated continued-prologue establishes the picture's coordinated continued-stylized-noir-visual-style and its coordinated continued-anthology-narrative-structure. The picture's first major coordinated continued-narrative-segment is titled The Hard Goodbye, focused on the coordinated continued-protagonist Marv (Mickey Rourke), a coordinated continued-large-physically-imposing Sin-City-resident whose coordinated continued-personal-life has been substantially-shaped by his coordinated continued-emotional-isolation. Marv's coordinated continued-brief-romantic-engagement with the coordinated continued-prostitute Goldie (Jaime King) ends with Goldie's coordinated continued-mysterious-personal-death; Marv's coordinated continued-personal-objective becomes the coordinated continued-systematic-elimination of the broader-individuals responsible for Goldie's coordinated continued-personal-death. --- ### Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/sin-city-a-dame-to-kill-for-2014.html **Director:** Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez **Studio:** Dimension Films **Universe:** Dark Horse **Source material:** Dark Horse Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.5/10 **Lead cast:** Mickey Rourke, Eva Green, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Josh Brolin, Jessica Alba **Synopsis:** Some of Basin City's most dangerous criminals — seduced by femme fatale Ava Lord — fight to survive the brutal, neon-noir streets in a prequel and sequel to the original Sin City. **Plot overview:** Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's 2014 sequel to Sin City (2005) returned to the coordinated continued-stylized-noir-anthology format with four additional interconnected criminal-noir narratives. The picture's commercial reception was substantially below the broader-2005-original-picture's coordinated continued-commercial-success. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a coordinated continued-Just Another Saturday Night narrative-segment in which Marv (Mickey Rourke) wakes up on a coordinated continued-Sin-City-highway with no coordinated continued-memory of how he arrived. The coordinated continued-segment establishes Marv's coordinated continued-investigative-engagement to reconstruct the broader-pre-amnesia events; his coordinated continued-investigation reveals a coordinated continued-criminal-organization that had been targeting Old Town residents in coordinated continued-systematic-fashion. Marv's coordinated continued-elimination of the broader-criminal-organization-operatives provides the opening-narrative-segment climactic-action throughline. The picture's primary narrative-segment is titled A Dame to Kill For, focused on the coordinated continued-protagonist Dwight McCarthy (Josh Brolin, in this picture replacing Clive Owen from the broader-2005-original-picture). Dwight's coordinated continued-pre-2005-narrative-segment-engagement positions him as a coordinated continued-private-investigator whose coordinated continued-personal-pursuit by his ex-lover Ava Lord (Eva Green) provides the picture's primary romantic-throughline. Ava's coordinated continued-personal-objective is the coordinated continued-deployment of Dwight against her coordinated continued-current-husband Damien Lord (Marton Csokas), whose coordinated continued-wealthy-administrative-position positions him as Ava's coordinated continued-personal-target. --- ### Spawn (1997) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/spawn-1997.html **Director:** Mark A.Z. Dippé **Studio:** New Line Cinema **Universe:** Image Comics **Source material:** Image Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.1/10 **Lead cast:** Michael Jai White, John Leguizamo, Martin Sheen, Theresa Randle **Synopsis:** A murdered black-ops soldier makes a deal with a devil and returns to Earth as Spawn — a creature of the night with supernatural powers — to exact revenge and protect the innocent. **Plot overview:** Mark A.Z. Dippé's 1997 film starring Michael Jai White was the first major comic-book film to feature an African-American superhero in the title role. The picture adapted Todd McFarlane's Image Comics character into an early-CGI-driven supernatural action film. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive demonic-realm establishing footage and voice-over narration by the Clown / Violator (John Leguizamo), a manifested-fallen-angel character whose role as the film's primary villain will be gradually revealed. The Clown's narration explains the broader cosmology: Hell is preparing for an apocalyptic ground-war against Heaven, and Hell's army requires a general capable of commanding the demonic infantry through the dimensional gateway. The previous general candidate has died, and Hell's deity Malebolgia (a giant tentacled-CGI entity) is selecting a new candidate. The candidate must be a recently-deceased mortal whose anger and grief have been deliberately weaponized for the position. The film's main plot picks up with covert operative Al Simmons (Michael Jai White), the U.S. government's most-effective black-ops assassin, who has been working under his handler Jason Wynn (Martin Sheen) for nearly a decade. Wynn is the director of a top-secret federal agency called A-6 that operates entirely off-budget and beyond congressional oversight. Simmons is engaged to Wanda Blake (Theresa Randle), a beautiful and idealistic charity-foundation administrator who has no knowledge of his actual work. Simmons has decided to retire from black-ops and marry Wanda. He attempts to resign during a Hong Kong assignment briefing. --- ### Spider-Man (2002) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/spider-man-2002.html **Director:** Sam Raimi **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.4/10 **Lead cast:** Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Willem Dafoe, James Franco **Synopsis:** Bitten by a genetically altered spider, nerdy high school student Peter Parker gains incredible powers and becomes Spider-Man, taking on his first great villain — the Green Goblin. **Plot overview:** Sam Raimi's 2002 film launched the modern superhero blockbuster era and made Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker an icon. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a voiceover from Peter Parker — a thin, bookish 17-year-old high school student in Queens, New York. He lives with his Uncle Ben and Aunt May, his parents having died in a plane crash years earlier. Peter is bullied by Flash Thompson and his friends at Midtown Science High School. He has been quietly in love with his next-door neighbor Mary Jane Watson — a redheaded aspiring actress whose father is verbally abusive — since they were in fourth grade. Peter's only real friend is Harry Osborn, the wealthy son of OsCorp magnate Norman Osborn. The three of them ride a school bus to a science field trip at Columbia University, where the genetics department is showcasing genetically engineered super-spiders. During the field trip, Peter is bitten on the hand by an escaped genetically modified spider. By the next morning, his vision has improved to the point where he no longer needs glasses. His muscles have firmed. His body has restructured. At school the next day, Peter discovers he can produce silk-thread webbing from his wrists, climb sheer walls, leap impossible distances, and avoid danger by an instinctive precognitive sense. Walking home, he confronts Flash and easily handles him in front of the entire student body. He tells no one. Meanwhile, at OsCorp Industries, Norman Osborn is under enormous pressure: his company's military contract is being canceled. He decides to test his experimental human performance enhancer on himself. The serum kills his lab assistant Stromm and makes Norman violently insane. He awakens in his Manhattan brownstone with no memory of having killed Stromm. --- ### Spider-Man 2 (2004) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/spider-man-2-2004.html **Director:** Sam Raimi **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.5/10 **Lead cast:** Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Alfred Molina, James Franco **Synopsis:** Peter Parker struggles to balance his life as an ordinary college student with his duties as Spider-Man, while facing the brilliant but tragically troubled scientist Doctor Octopus. **Plot overview:** Sam Raimi's 2004 sequel is widely considered one of the greatest superhero films ever made, balancing kinetic spectacle with genuine emotional weight. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** Two years after the events of the first film, Peter Parker's life is unraveling. He's juggling college coursework at Columbia University with two part-time jobs — pizza delivery and freelance photography for the Daily Bugle — and is failing at both. His pizza-delivery job is on the verge of being terminated for chronic lateness because Spider-Man duties keep interrupting his shifts. Mary Jane Watson, now a successful Broadway actress in The Importance of Being Earnest, is dating astronaut John Jameson — son of Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson. Aunt May has lost the family home to foreclosure and is being evicted to a tiny rental apartment. Peter has not visited his uncle's grave in months. He has not slept properly in weeks. Most troubling, his powers are intermittently failing — his web-shooters jam, his strength flickers, his wall-crawling fades — apparently due to a psychosomatic crisis of identity. At Columbia, Peter takes a renewed interest in Doctor Otto Octavius — a brilliant nuclear physicist married to his loving wife Rosie. Otto is preparing to demonstrate a fusion-reactor experiment that could solve the world's energy crisis. To control the experimental fusion sphere, he has designed four mechanical arms with artificial intelligence chips, surgically grafted to his spinal cord through a vertebra-mounted neural inhibitor that prevents the arms from controlling his behavior. Peter, intern-photographer-on-assignment for the Bugle, attends the public demonstration. The experiment goes catastrophically wrong: the fusion containment fails, the demonstration room melts, Rosie is killed by flying glass, and the inhibitor chip on Otto's spine is fried. Otto is left with the four mechanical arms now permanently controlling his behavior — the AIs influencing his thoughts. Peter, in the chaos, fails to save Rosie. --- ### Spider-Man 3 (2007) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/spider-man-3-2007.html **Director:** Sam Raimi **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.2/10 **Lead cast:** Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Topher Grace, Thomas Haden Church **Synopsis:** Peter Parker discovers a mysterious alien entity called the symbiote that amplifies his dark side, forcing him to confront his greatest enemies — including himself — as Spider-Man faces his toughest test. **Plot overview:** Sam Raimi's 2007 trilogy closer was the most expensive film ever made at its release and remains one of the most divisive entries in the franchise. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with Peter Parker's life seemingly at its peak. Mary Jane Watson is starring in a Broadway musical. Peter has finished college and is preparing to propose to her. New York adores Spider-Man. He is, briefly, happy. The opening credits play over a Spider-Man swing through Times Square. Trouble arrives quickly. Harry Osborn, having spent two years training, donning his late father's experimental performance enhancer, and rebuilding the Goblin technology in secret, ambushes Peter in a Manhattan alley. Harry calls himself the New Goblin and operates a sleeker, more agile version of his father's flying glider. The two fight across rooftops in a brutal nighttime sequence. Peter slams Harry into a brick wall, knocking him unconscious. Harry suffers severe cranial trauma and short-term memory loss; he wakes in the hospital with no memory of his vendetta or that Peter is Spider-Man. On a separate track, escaped convict Flint Marko falls into a particle physics experiment in a remote desert facility. The accident genetically restructures his molecular composition: he becomes the Sandman, a man composed entirely of fine sand who can shape-shift, regrow severed limbs, and assume any density from grains to solid mass. Flint is desperate. His daughter is dying, and his criminal acts had been driven by the need for treatment funds. The film slowly reveals that Flint Marko is the actual killer of Peter's Uncle Ben — the original thief who shot Ben was Marko's accomplice; Marko fired the killing shot in panic. Captain Stacy of the NYPD informs Peter and Aunt May of this revised case file. Peter's emotional foundation cracks open. The killer he has been hating in absentia turns out to be a different man than the one who fell out the wrestling-warehouse window in the first film. --- ### Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/spider-man-across-the-spider-verse-2023.html **Director:** Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8.6/10 **Lead cast:** Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Oscar Isaac, Issa Rae **Synopsis:** Miles Morales catapults across the Multiverse, where he encounters a team of Spider-People charged with protecting its very existence, but faces a conflict over what it truly means to be a hero. **Plot overview:** Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson's 2023 animated sequel to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse expanded the multiverse-Spider-hero premise into a multi-film narrative arc. The picture grossed nearly $700 million globally and received universal critical acclaim. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in Brooklyn's Earth-65 dimension with extensive recap of Gwen Stacy / Spider-Woman's (Hailee Steinfeld) personal narrative since the events of the first picture. Gwen's father, a New York Police Department captain, has discovered her secret Spider-Woman identity and is currently leading a coordinated police investigation to apprehend the masked vigilante whom he believes was responsible for the death of his daughter's friend Peter Parker (an alternate-universe Peter Parker who had transformed himself into the Lizard before his death in the first picture). Gwen's domestic situation has collapsed under the strain of his investigation; she has been hiding from her father's official duties while attempting to manage her dual-identity grief. Gwen's first introduction to the picture's multiverse-emergency situation occurs during a coordinated combat encounter with a renegade Spider-Society agent. The Vulture (Jorma Taccone), a multiverse-displaced version of the Sony's Spider-Man Homecoming villain who has been visually re-imagined as an Italian-Renaissance-themed flying mechanical-suit attacker, has crashed into Gwen's Earth-65 dimension through an unauthorized dimensional-transit incident. Gwen's coordinated combat with the Vulture is interrupted by the arrival of Miguel O'Hara / Spider-Man 2099 (Oscar Isaac), the leader of the Spider-Society's interdimensional-policing organization, who recruits Gwen as a junior Society operative. --- ### Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/spider-man-far-from-home-2019.html **Director:** Jon Watts **Studio:** Marvel Studios / Sony **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.4/10 **Lead cast:** Tom Holland, Samuel L. Jackson, Zendaya, Jake Gyllenhaal **Synopsis:** Peter Parker's school trip to Europe is interrupted by the appearance of Mysterio, an apparently heroic figure from another dimension, and a series of elemental monster attacks. **Plot overview:** Jon Watts's 2019 follow-up was the first MCU film released after the conclusion of the Infinity Saga and the death of Tony Stark. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with an in-memoriam tribute video produced by the Midtown School of Science and Technology — a hilariously rough-cut student production memorializing the Avengers who died in Endgame, set to a poorly licensed Whitney Houston track. Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, Vision, and Steve Rogers (presumed retired) are featured in awkward yearbook-style framings. Cut to Peter Parker, eight months after Endgame and the universal restoration event nicknamed the Blip. Half the world has just suddenly returned from a five-year absence. Most of Peter's classmates were dusted alongside him. They have all returned the same age, while everyone who survived the Snap aged five years. Peter is exhausted from being one of the most public superheroes in the world, and is desperately looking forward to a school summer trip to Europe with his Decathlon team. Peter has a plan for the trip. He is finally going to tell MJ — who he has slowly fallen for over the past year — how he feels. He has bought a black-dahlia necklace at the airport gift shop. Aunt May, who is dating Happy Hogan in the post-Snap chaos, has packed Peter's Spider-Man suit in his luggage just in case. Peter does not want to be Spider-Man on this trip. He wants to be a teenage tourist in Venice. The team arrives in Venice. Peter meets MJ at the hotel and almost confesses his feelings before being interrupted by an elemental water-monster attack on the canals. A masked figure in a fishbowl helmet flies in and defeats the creature. The figure introduces himself as Quentin Beck, a hero from a parallel universe destroyed by similar elementals. --- ### Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/spider-man-homecoming-2017.html **Director:** Jon Watts **Studio:** Marvel Studios / Sony **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.4/10 **Lead cast:** Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr., Jon Favreau, Zendaya **Synopsis:** Peter Parker, energized by his experience with the Avengers, balances high school life while battling the Vulture — a dangerous arms dealer using stolen alien technology — as Spider-Man. **Plot overview:** Tom Holland's first solo Spider-Man film resolved a fifteen-year studio dispute between Marvel and Sony, finally bringing Peter Parker into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a brief flashback to 2012, immediately after the Battle of New York from The Avengers. A blue-collar salvage contractor named Adrian Toomes has just been awarded the cleanup contract for the alien wreckage strewn across Manhattan. His crew is hours into the job when a federal agency — Damage Control, a joint government and Stark Industries venture — arrives and informs Toomes that his contract is being unilaterally terminated. Toomes loses everything: his crew, his trucks, his investment in specialized equipment. But before leaving the site, his men quietly take several crates of recovered Chitauri technology with them. Toomes decides to keep the equipment and use it to build illegal weapons in secret. The story jumps forward to several months after the events of Captain America: Civil War. Peter Parker, fifteen years old, has just returned to Queens after his recruitment by Tony Stark for the Berlin airport battle. Tony has gifted Peter a high-tech upgraded Spider-Man suit but has explicitly told Peter to lay low — be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, not an Avenger. Peter, unable to focus on his ordinary teenage life, ditches his Stark internship every afternoon to patrol Queens, with mostly low-stakes results: stopping bike thieves, helping old ladies, occasionally being mistaken for a stripper at a child's birthday party. He grows increasingly impatient for the call that will bring him back into the Avengers' orbit. --- ### Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/spider-man-into-the-spider-verse-2018.html **Director:** Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8.4/10 **Lead cast:** Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali **Synopsis:** Teen Miles Morales becomes the Spider-Man of his universe and must team up with five other Spider-People across the multiverse to stop a threat that imperils all dimensions. --- ### Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/spider-man-no-way-home-2021.html **Director:** Jon Watts **Studio:** Marvel Studios / Sony **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8.2/10 **Lead cast:** Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alfred Molina, Jamie Foxx **Synopsis:** When Spider-Man's identity is revealed, he asks Doctor Strange to make the world forget — but the spell goes wrong, opening the multiverse and unleashing villains from other dimensions. **Plot overview:** Jon Watts's 2021 conclusion to the Tom Holland trilogy united three generations of Spider-Men on the big screen for the first time and brought the multiverse fully into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Below is the complete plot of the film, told in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the picture. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens directly where Far From Home ended. Mysterio's posthumous broadcast — doctored to falsely accuse Spider-Man of his murder and to publicly reveal Peter Parker's identity — is replaying on every screen in New York. Peter, MJ Watson, Ned Leeds, and Aunt May are mobbed on the Manhattan streets. Within hours, Peter's life has collapsed. The Department of Damage Control raids his apartment. He and his closest people are pulled into legal proceedings. Matt Murdock — a blind defense attorney — successfully argues for Peter's release, but the personal damage is total. Peter, MJ, and Ned attempt to apply to MIT together, only to receive rejection letters. Aunt May has been forced out of her job. The pressure of being the most famous teenager in the world has erased their futures. Desperate, Peter visits Doctor Stephen Strange at the New York Sanctum and asks for help. Strange, exiled from the Sorcerer Supreme position by Wong (now occupying the role), agrees to cast a spell that will make the entire world forget Peter is Spider-Man. Halfway through the spell's casting, Peter realizes the spell will erase him from the memories of his closest people too — MJ, Ned, May. He repeatedly interrupts Strange to add carve-outs. The interruptions cause the spell to crack open in unintended ways. Strange manages to contain it before catastrophic damage, but the damage is already done. The spell briefly drew in people from across the multiverse who knew Peter Parker — five villains and three other Spider-Men, all from realities where Peter's identity was already public. --- ### Suicide Squad (2016) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/suicide-squad-2016.html **Director:** David Ayer **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.9/10 **Lead cast:** Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, Viola Davis, Joel Kinnaman **Synopsis:** A secret government agency assembles a team of dangerous, imprisoned supervillains to execute black ops missions in exchange for clemency — with explosive implants as insurance. **Plot overview:** David Ayer's 2016 Suicide Squad was the third DCEU film, introducing the team of incarcerated supervillains coerced into black-ops missions. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens at the Belle Reve maximum-security prison in Louisiana, where intelligence official Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) is briefing senior U.S. military advisors on a contingency program she calls Task Force X. In the post-Superman world, Waller has identified that the next major threat to humanity will be a metahuman one. She proposes assembling a team of incarcerated supervillains, controlled via explosive head implants, to deploy against future metahuman crises. The Pentagon brass is skeptical but agrees to a trial deployment. Waller's team is assembled from Belle Reve's most dangerous inmates: Deadshot, Harley Quinn, El Diablo, Captain Boomerang, Killer Croc, Slipknot, and Katana (the latter as Rick Flag's personal bodyguard). Lengthy introductory flashbacks establish each character. Floyd Lawton (Will Smith) is Deadshot, a master assassin who never misses a shot, whose only attachment is his young daughter Zoe. Harleen Quinzel / Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) was a brilliant Arkham psychiatrist who fell in love with her patient the Joker (Jared Leto) during therapy sessions; her flashback shows her transformation through electroshock, chemical bath, and growing infatuation with the Joker's madness. Chato Santana / El Diablo is a former Los Angeles gang member with pyrokinetic powers who accidentally killed his wife and children in a domestic-rage outburst. Captain Boomerang is an Australian thief with a comedic register. Killer Croc is a gangster afflicted with reptilian skin condition. Slipknot is a freelance assassin with rope expertise. --- ### Super 30 (2019) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/super-30-2019.html **Director:** Vikas Bahl **Studio:** Reliance Entertainment **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 7/10 **Lead cast:** Hrithik Roshan, Mrunal Thakur, Pankaj Tripathi **Synopsis:** Inspired by the true story of mathematician Anand Kumar, who runs a free coaching program called Super 30 for talented students from impoverished backgrounds aiming for IIT. **Plot overview:** Vikas Bahl's 2019 Indian Hindi-language biographical drama starred Hrithik Roshan as the mathematician Anand Kumar, whose coordinated continued educational-coaching program has been training-economically-disadvantaged Indian-students for the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology entrance examinations. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in the rural Patna environment with extensive flashback to the young Anand Kumar (Hrithik Roshan) coordinated continued-residence with his coordinated family. Anand's coordinated continued-personal-mathematical-aptitude has been substantially-developed through his coordinated continued-self-study from his coordinated late-father's accumulated mathematical-research notes. His coordinated continued-personal-mathematical-aptitude has been substantially-demonstrated through his coordinated continued-competitive-examination success across multiple coordinated continued-academic-competitions. His coordinated continued-personal-acceptance to the prestigious Cambridge-University-coordinated academic-program represents the broader-narrative's primary motivational-foundation. Anand's coordinated continued-Cambridge-University-acceptance has been substantially-complicated by his coordinated continued-family-economic circumstances. The coordinated continued-Cambridge-University-acceptance requires substantial coordinated continued-economic-funding that Anand's coordinated continued-family-economic circumstances cannot accommodate. Anand's coordinated extended-personal-attempt to coordinate continued-economic-funding through coordinated continued-personal-application-submission to multiple coordinated continued-scholarship-and-grant-providing organizations produces extended coordinated continued-personal-rejection patterns across multiple coordinated continued-months. His coordinated continued-personal-emotional-response includes both coordinated continued-personal-disappointment and coordinated continued-personal-resolve toward coordinated continued-alternate-pathway development. --- ### Supergirl (1984) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/supergirl-1984.html **Director:** Jeannot Szwarc **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 4.9/10 **Lead cast:** Helen Slater, Faye Dunaway, Peter O'Toole **Synopsis:** Kara Zor-El, Superman's cousin, leaves her home in Argo City to recover a powerful energy source stolen by the wicked witch Selena, who plans to use it to rule the world. **Plot overview:** Jeannot Szwarc's 1984 film served as a spinoff to the Christopher Reeve Superman franchise, starring Helen Slater as Superman's cousin Kara. The picture was widely regarded as one of the most-commercially-unsuccessful spinoffs of the era. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in Argo City, a coordinated continued-Kryptonian colony-settlement whose coordinated continued-residential-environment exists within a coordinated continued-dimensional-pocket-space whose coordinated continued-isolation provides protection from the broader-Kryptonian-civilization-destruction. Argo City's coordinated continued-population includes Kara Zor-El (Helen Slater), a young Kryptonian-descended teenage girl whose coordinated continued-residence with her coordinated continued-parents Zor-El (Simon Ward) and Alura (Mia Farrow) provides the picture's primary family-relationship-development establishing context. Kara's coordinated continued-mentor Zaltar (Peter O'Toole), a coordinated continued-elderly Argo City scientist, provides the picture's primary supporting-character introduction. Zaltar's coordinated continued-research-project is the coordinated continued-development of a coordinated continued-Omegahedron device whose coordinated continued-deployment provides Argo City's coordinated continued-residential-environment with its coordinated continued-dimensional-pocket-stability. The coordinated continued-Omegahedron's coordinated continued-continued-residential-environment-stability is precarious; without the coordinated continued-Omegahedron's coordinated continued-operation, Argo City's coordinated continued-dimensional-pocket-environment will rapidly destabilize. Zaltar's coordinated continued-personal-decision to coordinate the coordinated continued-Omegahedron-test-deployment in the broader-physical-environment outside the coordinated continued-dimensional-pocket-space produces an unintended coordinated continued-Omegahedron-loss incident. --- ### Superman (1978) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/superman-1978.html **Director:** Richard Donner **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.3/10 **Lead cast:** Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Marlon Brando **Synopsis:** The last son of Krypton, raised as Clark Kent in rural Kansas, discovers his extraordinary powers and moves to Metropolis to become Superman — facing his first great nemesis, the cunning Lex Luthor. **Plot overview:** Richard Donner's 1978 Superman launched the modern superhero film era and established Christopher Reeve as the definitive cinematic Man of Steel for an entire generation. Featuring an iconic John Williams score, groundbreaking flying effects for its time, and a beloved supporting cast led by Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman, the picture remains foundational to the entire genre. Below is the complete plot of the film, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the picture and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a stylized prologue on the dying planet Krypton. Jor-El (Marlon Brando), an elder scientist on the Kryptonian high council, has determined through advanced geophysical study that the planet is days away from catastrophic core collapse. He presents his findings to the ruling council; they reject his conclusions and forbid him from publicizing the discovery. As a private contingency, Jor-El builds a small experimental rocket and places his infant son Kal-El inside it, programming the rocket with the location of a habitable planet (Earth) and a comprehensive Kryptonian knowledge archive embedded in crystalline data form. The rocket launches moments before Krypton's planetary destruction. The opening sequence ends with Krypton's exploding remains receding behind the rocket as it travels through interstellar space. The rocket lands in a Kansas wheatfield in the late 1940s. The infant Kal-El is discovered by Jonathan and Martha Kent, an aging childless farming couple, who name him Clark and raise him as their son. The film's middle prologue chronicles Clark's adolescence in Smallville. Clark's superhuman abilities manifest gradually: he can run faster than the school bus, lift impossibly heavy farm equipment, and see through solid objects with concentrated effort. Jonathan Kent, sensing the mounting frustration of a son who cannot publicly demonstrate his powers, counsels Clark that there is a higher purpose to his being on Earth that has not yet been revealed. Jonathan dies of a heart attack in the wheatfield while talking to Clark, leaving the young man with unresolved questions about his own identity. --- ### Superman (2025) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/superman-2025.html **Director:** James Gunn **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.2/10 **Lead cast:** David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Nathan Fillion **Synopsis:** The first live-action film of the rebooted DC Universe. David Corenswet stars as Clark Kent / Superman, balancing his dual heritage as a Kryptonian and a Kansas-raised reporter while navigating an emerging world of metahumans. **Plot overview:** James Gunn's 2025 reboot starred David Corenswet as a new Clark Kent / Superman in the official launch of the new DC Universe cinematic franchise. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with text-only narration establishing the alternate-history context. Superhuman beings (metahumans) have existed publicly on Earth for over three hundred years. Superman (David Corenswet) is the most-prominent contemporary metahuman, having been publicly active for approximately three years prior to the film's main narrative. The opening text-narration provides the audience with extensive background about Superman's origins, his civilian-identity at the Daily Planet, his romantic relationship with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and his ongoing complications with various global geopolitical situations. The text-narration approach was widely cited as one of the picture's most-discussed creative choices, deliberately departing from prior Superman films' origin-story expositions. The film's main narrative picks up with Superman recovering in the Arctic Fortress of Solitude after a brutal combat encounter with the Hammer of Boravia, a Boravian-government super-powered enforcer whose physical abilities exceed Superman's in close-quarters combat. Superman's wounds are severe; he summons Krypto, his Kryptonian-genetically-engineered dog, who assists in transporting Superman back to the Fortress for recovery. The opening establishes Superman as more vulnerable than prior film interpretations, capable of being injured and physically defeated by sufficiently-powerful adversaries. --- ### Superman II (1980) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/superman-ii-1980.html **Director:** Richard Lester **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.8/10 **Lead cast:** Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Terence Stamp, Gene Hackman **Synopsis:** Superman faces three Kryptonian criminals led by the villainous General Zod, who seek to dominate Earth. Meanwhile, Clark must choose between love and his destiny as a superhero. **Plot overview:** The 1980 sequel to Superman continued the Christopher Reeve-led franchise with a triple-Kryptonian-villain conflict that brought Marlon Brando-cut footage and Richard Lester directorial reshoots into competing theatrical and Donner-cut versions. Below is the complete plot of the film, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the picture and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a recap-prologue revisiting the Krypton trial sequence from the original Superman. Three Kryptonian war criminals, General Zod (Terence Stamp), the cold-blooded Ursa (Sarah Douglas), and the brutish Non (Jack O'Halloran), are sentenced by the council of Kryptonian elders for an attempted coup. They are sealed inside the Phantom Zone, a dimensional prison projected as a flat reflective rectangle that absorbs them when its surface shatters around their bodies. The prison is launched into deep space. The Phantom Zone is unstable; the criminals' eventual freedom is established as the film's looming inevitability rather than its surprise. The opening sequence concludes with the prison rectangle drifting on its multi-decade trajectory toward Earth. Cut to the present day, days after the events of the original Superman. Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve) and Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) are assigned by Daily Planet editor Perry White to cover a terrorist incident at the Eiffel Tower. A French nuclear device has been planted in a sealed elevator at the tower's apex; the elevator must be safely jettisoned into space before detonation. Superman intercepts the elevator mid-launch and hurls it into the upper atmosphere, where the bomb detonates harmlessly. The detonation, however, also shatters the long-drifting Phantom Zone prison nearby. Zod, Ursa, and Non are released back into corporeal form and immediately make their way toward the nearest source of Kryptonian energy, which is Earth. --- ### Superman III (1983) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/superman-iii-1983.html **Director:** Richard Lester **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.8/10 **Lead cast:** Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Robert Vaughn **Synopsis:** A bumbling computer genius is manipulated by a corrupt businessman to use his skills against Superman, leading to the Man of Steel's personality being split in two. **Plot overview:** Richard Lester's 1983 third entry in the Christopher Reeve Superman franchise pivoted the series toward broader-comedic tones with Richard Pryor as a co-lead. The picture is widely considered the franchise's commercial-decline turning point. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extended slapstick-comedy establishing sequences in Metropolis, where unemployed mid-career office worker Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor) attempts to qualify for a federal unemployment-extension program by accepting any available work assignment. Gus is assigned to a Webster Industries computer-programming position despite his demonstrably-limited computer-coding qualifications. The opening setpiece, a complex domino-effect physical-comedy sequence on a Metropolis sidewalk involving a wind-up toy, a baby stroller, and several inadvertent collisions, establishes the picture's substantially-shifted tonal direction toward broader-comedic material compared to the prior Superman pictures. Clark Kent / Superman's (Christopher Reeve) civilian life at the Daily Planet has continued in the previous installments' tradition. He is preparing to return to his birthplace of Smallville for the Smallville High School class reunion, an event he has not previously attended in his adult-Clark-Kent civilian identity. The reunion provides the film's primary character-relationship throughline: Clark's reconnection with his high-school classmate Lana Lang (Annette O'Toole), a single mother who has remained in Smallville and works at a local restaurant. Their potential romantic relationship runs parallel to the film's broader villain-pursuit narrative. --- ### Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/superman-iv-the-quest-for-peace-1987.html **Director:** Sidney J. Furie **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 3.7/10 **Lead cast:** Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Jon Cryer **Synopsis:** Superman takes it upon himself to rid the world of nuclear weapons, but Lex Luthor creates a new enemy — Nuclear Man — powered by the sun to destroy the Man of Steel. **Plot overview:** Sidney J. Furie's 1987 fourth entry in the Christopher Reeve Superman franchise had Superman attempt to globally disarm the world's nuclear weapons. The picture's commercial-and-critical failure effectively ended the franchise for nearly two decades. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive Cold-War-context establishing sequences. The international geopolitical situation has reached its mid-1980s peak of nuclear-confrontation tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. A young schoolboy named Jeremy (Damian McLawhorn) has written a personal letter to Superman asking the superhero to use his abilities to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The letter, processed through the Daily Planet's editorial mail-room, reaches Clark Kent's desk and produces a moral-philosophical crisis for Clark's Superman identity. The opening establishes the film's central question: does Superman have a moral obligation to use his abilities for political-disarmament purposes, or do his hero-ethics require him to refrain from imposing his values on global politics? Clark Kent's Daily Planet workplace has been disrupted by a corporate-takeover acquisition. The newspaper has been acquired by tabloid-magnate David Warfield (Sam Wanamaker) and his pop-celebrity daughter Lacy (Mariel Hemingway), whose editorial direction will pivot the paper toward sensationalist-celebrity coverage. The change disrupts Clark's longstanding professional collegial relationships with editor Perry White (Jackie Cooper), reporter Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), and photographer Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure). Lacy Warfield's personal romantic interest in Clark Kent provides one of the film's secondary character throughlines. --- ### Swamp Thing (1982) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/swamp-thing-1982.html **Director:** Wes Craven **Studio:** Embassy Pictures **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.9/10 **Lead cast:** Louis Jourdan, Adrienne Barbeau, Ray Wise **Synopsis:** A scientist is transformed into a swamp monster after an accident in the bayou. Hunted and misunderstood, he must protect an innocent woman from a villainous industrialist. **Plot overview:** Wes Craven's 1982 film adapted Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's DC Comics character into a low-budget live-action production. The picture launched a small franchise of Swamp Thing adaptations across multiple subsequent decades. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in a remote Louisiana-bayou environment where the brilliant biochemist Dr. Alec Holland (Ray Wise) has been working coordinated extensively on his coordinated continued-research project: the coordinated continued-development of a coordinated continued-bio-restoration formula whose coordinated continued-deployment can produce dramatic-accelerated-plant-and-animal-tissue regrowth across coordinated continued damaged-environmental conditions. Alec's coordinated continued-research has been substantially-funded by the broader-United-States-government's coordinated continued-defense-research-administrative system; the coordinated continued-research-facility is located in a coordinated continued-isolated-bayou-laboratory structure whose coordinated continued-isolation provides substantial broader-research-security protection. Alec's coordinated continued-research-partner is his sister Linda Holland (Nannette Brown), whose coordinated continued-research-engagement provides additional scientific-aptitude to the broader-research-team. The arrival of government-administrator Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau) for a coordinated continued-research-progress-investigation provides the picture's primary supporting-character introduction; Alice's coordinated continued-personal-engagement with Alec is depicted as gradually-developing-romantic-tension across the broader-picture's first act. The Hollands' coordinated continued-research-progress has reached substantial-pre-deployment-readiness; the coordinated continued-bio-restoration-formula is approaching coordinated continued-final-testing-stage. --- ### Tank Girl (1995) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/tank-girl-1995.html **Director:** Rachel Talalay **Studio:** United Artists **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.5/10 **Lead cast:** Lori Petty, Ice-T, Naomi Watts, Malcolm McDowell **Synopsis:** In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a rebellious young woman and her genetically engineered kangaroo-soldier companion take on a totalitarian corporation controlling the world's water supply. **Plot overview:** Rachel Talalay's 1995 film adapted Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin's British comic-book character into an American post-apocalyptic-action production starring Lori Petty in the lead role. The picture is widely regarded as one of the most-distinctive cult-classic comic-book adaptations of the mid-1990s. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in a coordinated continued-post-apocalyptic-future Australian-environment in the year 2033, where a coordinated continued-catastrophic-comet-impact event approximately a decade earlier has produced substantial coordinated continued-environmental-degradation across the broader-civilization. The resulting coordinated continued-water-shortage-crisis has positioned the broader-civilization-administrative-control under the coordinated continued-corporate-administrative-organization Water and Power. Water and Power's coordinated continued-monopolistic-control of the broader-water-distribution-infrastructure has substantially-shaped the broader-civilization's coordinated continued-economic-and-political administrative arrangements. Rebecca Buck (Lori Petty), the picture's coordinated continued-protagonist, has been operating as an outlaw-civilian whose coordinated continued-resistance-engagement against Water and Power has been substantially-developed across multiple coordinated continued-years. Rebecca's coordinated continued-personality is depicted with substantial coordinated continued-anarchic-individualistic register: she rides a coordinated continued-customized motorcycle, wears a coordinated continued-mohawk-and-tattoo-distinctive personal-appearance, and engages in coordinated continued-personal-confrontation with broader-Water-and-Power-administrative-figures with unusual coordinated continued-defiant-attitude. Her coordinated continued-residence in a coordinated continued-small-resistance-community provides the picture's primary narrative-foundation. --- ### Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-1990.html **Director:** Steve Barron **Studio:** New Line Cinema **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.6/10 **Lead cast:** Judith Hoag, Elias Koteas, Josh Pais, Michelan Sisti **Synopsis:** Four mutant turtles trained in the art of ninjutsu by a wise rat sensei emerge from the sewers of New York City to battle the evil Shredder and his Foot Clan. **Plot overview:** Steve Barron's 1990 film adapted Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's TMNT comic-book franchise into a coordinated live-action production combining coordinated continued-animatronic-character work with coordinated continued-live-action-supporting-cast performances. The picture became the highest-grossing independent film of all time at the point of its release. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in coordinated continued-contemporary-New York-City with the introduction of a coordinated continued-wave of unexplained coordinated continued-property-thefts across the broader-Manhattan-environment. The coordinated continued-theft-pattern has been substantially-coordinated; multiple coordinated continued-commercial-and-residential properties have been simultaneously-impacted across multiple coordinated continued-Manhattan-neighborhoods. The broader-New-York-Police-Department's coordinated continued-investigative-engagement has been substantially-frustrated by the coordinated continued-absence of coordinated continued-eyewitness-evidence; the coordinated continued-criminal-organization-perpetrators have been substantially-stealthy in their coordinated continued-operations. Investigative-journalist April O'Neil (Judith Hoag), a coordinated continued-Channel-3-News reporter, has been pursuing the broader-property-theft-story across multiple coordinated continued-Manhattan-neighborhoods. Her coordinated continued-personal-investigation produces an unexpected-coordinated continued-direct-confrontation with the broader-criminal-organization's coordinated continued-operatives: the Foot Clan, a coordinated continued-ninja-organization whose coordinated continued-juvenile-recruits have been the primary-coordinated continued-property-theft-perpetrators. April's coordinated continued-direct-confrontation with multiple coordinated continued-Foot-Clan-operatives produces her coordinated continued-personal-rescue by an unexpected-coordinated continued-anthropomorphic-turtle-team. --- ### The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-amazing-spider-man-2012.html **Director:** Marc Webb **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.9/10 **Lead cast:** Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Denis Leary **Synopsis:** A new take on Spider-Man's origins — teenager Peter Parker sets out to investigate his parents' mysterious disappearance, gaining spider powers and confronting the villainous Lizard. **Plot overview:** Marc Webb's 2012 reboot started a new Spider-Man trilogy with Andrew Garfield in the title role, only five years after Sam Raimi's earlier franchise had ended its run with the divisive Spider-Man 3 (2007). Below is the complete plot of the film, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the picture. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a young Peter Parker discovering his father's home office has been ransacked. Documents are scattered. His father Richard quickly packs Peter into a car with his mother Mary, drives him to his Aunt May and Uncle Ben's house in Queens, and disappears into the night with his wife. Peter never sees his parents again. They die in a plane crash months later. Cut to a teenage Peter, now living with Aunt May and Uncle Ben in a modest Queens home. He is socially awkward and skateboard-obsessed. He attends Midtown Science High School. He is bullied by Flash Thompson and quietly fascinated by Gwen Stacy, the brilliant and confident daughter of NYPD Captain George Stacy. Peter discovers his late father's old briefcase in the basement, containing photographs of Richard with another scientist named Dr. Curt Connors and a notebook of cryptic genetic equations. Peter, looking for clues about his father's research, sneaks into OsCorp Industries by impersonating an intern named Rodrigo Guevara. He attends a tour of the genetic-engineering laboratory, where he wanders into a restricted area to find Curt Connors's department. The lab contains a colony of genetically modified spiders engineered as part of a cross-species genetic study. One of them bites Peter on the neck. By morning, Peter has the now-familiar abilities: enhanced strength, agility, wall-crawling, precognitive spider-sense. He develops mechanical web-shooters at home using OsCorp's research as a starting point — synthesizing his own webfluid in his bedroom and building wrist-mounted dispensers. --- ### The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-amazing-spider-man-2-2014.html **Director:** Marc Webb **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.6/10 **Lead cast:** Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Dane DeHaan, Paul Giamatti **Synopsis:** Peter Parker faces multiple threats — the electricity-powered Electro and his old friend Harry Osborn becoming the Green Goblin — while uncovering the truth about his parents. **Plot overview:** Marc Webb's 2014 sequel ended Andrew Garfield's run as Spider-Man on a famously dark note that adapted one of the most-cited tragic moments in superhero comic-book history. Below is the complete plot of the film, told in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the picture. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in mid-air. Richard and Mary Parker — Peter's biological parents — are aboard a small private jet attempting to escape a hijacker. Richard transmits scientific research files via a hidden uplink before the hijacker breaks into the cabin and a struggle leaves both Parkers dead in the resulting crash. The flashback establishes that Richard had been working on cross-species genetic experiments at OsCorp under conditions that ultimately put a target on his entire family. Cut to the present day. Peter Parker, now in his final year of high school, is delivering valedictorian speeches and has reunited romantically with Gwen Stacy despite his promise to her dying father. He is haunted by Captain Stacy's posthumous warning, repeatedly hallucinating the older man's accusing presence in mirrors and crowds. An OsCorp electrical engineer named Max Dillon is working alone late one night when an industrial accident drops him into a tank of genetically modified electric eels. The accident transforms his body into pure electrical energy. Max, who had been an obsessive Spider-Man fan after Peter saved his life weeks earlier, becomes confused, frightened, and increasingly resentful when Spider-Man fails to recognize him at a Times Square confrontation. The standoff escalates into a battle that demolishes much of the square. Max — now calling himself Electro — escapes into the city's electrical grid. He becomes a wanted man overnight. Meanwhile, Peter's old childhood best friend Harry Osborn returns to New York to take over OsCorp following the death of his terminally ill father Norman. --- ### The Avengers (2012) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-avengers-2012.html **Director:** Joss Whedon **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8/10 **Lead cast:** Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner **Synopsis:** Earth's mightiest heroes — Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye — are assembled by S.H.I.E.L.D. to stop Loki's alien invasion of Earth. **Plot overview:** Joss Whedon's 2012 ensemble film brought together six heroes for a single mission against an Asgardian invader and his alien army. Below is the complete plot — every act, beat, and twist — told in our own words. Heavy spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in a remote SHIELD research facility somewhere in the New Mexico desert, where Director Nick Fury and his deputy, Maria Hill, are inspecting a glowing cube called the Tesseract. The artifact, recovered decades earlier from Captain America's plane wreckage, has been stable for years but is now spitting waves of unstable energy. As Fury arrives, the Tesseract opens a portal — and through it steps Loki, the exiled prince of Asgard last seen falling into the void at the end of his brother Thor's first film. Loki seizes the cube, mind-controls multiple agents (including Hawkeye, Clint Barton) using a glowing scepter, and escapes as the entire facility collapses behind him. Faced with an extraterrestrial-level threat, Fury reactivates a long-shelved program called the Avenger Initiative. Agent Natasha Romanoff is dispatched to Calcutta to recruit Bruce Banner, a fugitive scientist hiding among the city's poorest after years on the run from the U.S. military. She convinces him SHIELD needs his expertise tracking gamma-radiation signatures in the Tesseract. In Stuttgart, Captain America (Steve Rogers, recently thawed from arctic ice) and Tony Stark (Iron Man) confront Loki, who is staging a public ritual of submission. Their standoff is interrupted by Thor, who arrives via Asgardian weather and abducts Loki mid-flight. A brief forest melee between Iron Man and Thor ends when Captain America intervenes, and the four reluctantly return to SHIELD's flying aircraft carrier — the Helicarrier. --- ### The Batman (2022) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-batman-2022.html **Director:** Matt Reeves **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.8/10 **Lead cast:** Robert Pattinson, Zoe Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, Colin Farrell **Synopsis:** In his second year as Gotham's vigilante, Bruce Wayne hunts the Riddler — a serial killer targeting the city's elite — uncovering a web of corruption that reaches into his own family's legacy and forcing him to redefine what Batman should mean to Gotham. **Plot overview:** Matt Reeves's noir-soaked 2022 reboot starred Robert Pattinson as a young, brooding Bruce Wayne in his second year as Gotham's vigilante. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens on Halloween night in Gotham City, observed through the binoculars of an unseen voyeur. The watcher is staking out the home of Mayor Don Mitchell Jr., who is deep into an election against an upstart reform candidate named Bella Reál. Mitchell is alone with his television. The watcher enters the apartment. He kills Mitchell with a carpet beater, wraps tape around his face, and leaves a sealed envelope addressed to "the Batman." Across the city, Bruce Wayne — in his second year as Gotham's masked vigilante — narrates his nightly patrol via a journal voiceover. He has not yet found the symbolic role he wants to play in Gotham. He fights street-level crime alongside police lieutenant James Gordon, who tolerates him; the rest of the GCPD detests him. Gordon brings Batman to the crime scene against the protests of his commissioner. The envelope contains a greeting card and a riddle — "What does a liar do when he's dead?" The killer signs himself the Riddler, drawn in a question-mark glyph. Embedded in Mitchell's body are the first clues to a much larger conspiracy: the Riddler has been planning a series of public murders, each targeting Gotham's most corrupt institutional figures. Each victim will receive his own personalized riddle from Batman to solve. The investigation pulls Bruce into an underground criminal world he had not previously paid attention to: the elite organized crime hierarchy that has controlled Gotham's politics for decades, headed by aging mafia don Carmine Falcone and his lieutenant the Penguin (Oz Cobblepot). --- ### The Crow (1994) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-crow-1994.html **Director:** Alex Proyas **Studio:** Dimension Films **Universe:** Image Comics **Source material:** Image Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.5/10 **Lead cast:** Brandon Lee, Michael Wincott, Rochelle Davis, Ernie Hudson **Synopsis:** A murdered rock musician is resurrected by a mystical crow to avenge his and his fiancée's deaths, hunting down the gang of killers responsible on Devil's Night. **Plot overview:** Alex Proyas's 1994 film adapted James O'Barr's coordinated continued-1989-comic-book character into a coordinated continued-dark gothic-revenge-thriller starring Brandon Lee in his final theatrical-feature engagement before his coordinated continued-on-set fatal-accident. The picture is widely regarded as one of the most-significant individual coordinated continued-comic-book-adaptation productions of the mid-1990s era. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in the coordinated continued-Detroit-environment on the night before Halloween, where the coordinated continued-musician Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) and his coordinated continued-fiancée Shelly Webster (Sofia Shinas) are preparing for their coordinated continued-wedding ceremony scheduled for the following day. Their coordinated continued-Detroit-apartment-environment has been their coordinated continued-residence across multiple coordinated continued-years; their coordinated continued-personal-relationship has been substantially-developed across the broader-period. The opening establishes the coordinated continued-emotional-foundation that will drive the broader-picture's revenge-narrative throughline. The coordinated continued-Detroit-area broader-criminal-organization, led by the coordinated continued-criminal-organization-leader Top Dollar (Michael Wincott), has been conducting coordinated continued-pervasive-criminal-operations across the broader-Detroit-environment. Top Dollar's coordinated continued-broader-criminal-organization includes multiple coordinated continued-supporting-criminal-operatives including T-Bird (David Patrick Kelly), Funboy (Michael Massee), Tin Tin (Laurence Mason), and Skank (Angel David); the coordinated continued-criminal-organization-members are characterized by coordinated continued-individual-distinctive-personality-elements. Top Dollar's coordinated continued-strategic-objective is the coordinated continued-systematic-coordinated criminal-pressure-application against the broader-Detroit-civilian-population. --- ### The Dark Knight (2008) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-dark-knight-2008.html **Director:** Christopher Nolan **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 9/10 **Lead cast:** Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman **Synopsis:** With the Joker sowing chaos throughout Gotham, Batman and Commissioner Gordon must accept a corrupting alliance with District Attorney Harvey Dent to dismantle organized crime — at tremendous personal cost. --- ### The Dark Knight Rises (2012) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-dark-knight-rises-2012.html **Director:** Christopher Nolan **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8.4/10 **Lead cast:** Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt **Synopsis:** Eight years after the Joker's reign of anarchy, a masked mercenary named Bane rises to lead a revolution against Gotham, forcing Bruce Wayne out of exile for one final confrontation. **Plot overview:** Christopher Nolan's 2012 Dark Knight Rises closed his Dark Knight Trilogy with a 165-minute conclusion involving Bane's terrorist takeover of Gotham. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a CIA extraction operation in Uzbekistan. A small CIA team is interrogating a group of mercenaries believed to be working for a terrorist named Bane, attempting to extract a Russian nuclear scientist named Dr. Pavel. The interrogation goes catastrophically wrong: Bane himself is among the captured mercenaries, his identity hidden behind a sack-mask. He reveals himself, kills the CIA team, and escapes the airborne aircraft mid-flight via a parachute extraction maneuver that physically rips the rear of the cargo plane off mid-flight. Pavel is taken alive. The opening sequence establishes Bane's tactical sophistication and his immunity to standard interrogation; he wears a permanent breathing apparatus that delivers a constant stream of pain-suppressing anesthetic to keep him functional after a previous lethal injury. Cut to Gotham City eight years after the events of The Dark Knight. Batman has not been seen since Harvey Dent's death; he has taken the public blame for Dent's murders to preserve the late District Attorney's reputation as Gotham's white knight. The resulting Dent Act has given Gotham police unprecedented surveillance and detention powers, and street-level organized crime has been almost entirely eliminated. Bruce Wayne lives as a recluse in Wayne Manor, walking with a cane after years of accumulated combat injuries, and has not appeared in public for nearly a decade. Wayne Enterprises is in financial crisis after Bruce's sponsored fusion-reactor research project was abandoned for safety reasons years earlier; the unfinished reactor sits in a hidden underground lab. --- ### The Flash (2023) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-flash-2023.html **Director:** Andy Muschietti **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.7/10 **Lead cast:** Ezra Miller, Michael Keaton, Sasha Calle, Ben Affleck **Synopsis:** Barry Allen travels back in time to prevent his mother's death but alters the future beyond his imagination, arriving in a world without metahumans that needs a very different kind of hero. **Plot overview:** Andy Muschietti's 2023 multiverse-spanning Flash film served as the canonical bridge between the original DCEU and James Gunn's incoming DCU reboot, briefly restoring Michael Keaton's 1989-era Batman. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in Gotham City. Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) is the resident speedster of the Justice League and a forensic technician for the Central City Police Department. Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck reprising his DCEU Batman role) calls Barry for emergency assistance after a bank robbery led by a Riddler-adjacent villain has caused the collapse of a Gotham hospital's maternity wing. Barry races to the scene at superhuman speed, simultaneously holding up the falling hospital, evacuating six newborns and a nurse, and catching falling debris in a complex sequence of microsecond decisions. The opening setpiece, running while attached to a series of rapidly assembled improvised tools, establishes the film's signature time-distortion visual language. Cut to Barry's domestic life. He is haunted by the unsolved childhood trauma of his mother Nora's murder. His father Henry Allen has been imprisoned for the killing for over twenty years; Barry has spent his adult life trying to clear his father's name through forensic appeals. The latest appeal is going badly, the prosecution has new circumstantial evidence, and Barry's emotional state is deteriorating. During a particularly difficult drive home, he accidentally accelerates beyond his usual top speed and finds himself running so fast that he physically crosses into a different temporal layer. He has discovered, by accident, that his Speed Force connection allows him to travel backward through time itself. --- ### The Incredible Hulk (2008) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-incredible-hulk-2008.html **Director:** Louis Leterrier **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.7/10 **Lead cast:** Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, Tim Roth, William Hurt **Synopsis:** Bruce Banner, hunted by a government general, must manage his curse and find a cure for his gamma-induced transformations, while a rival super-soldier experiment creates a new threat. **Plot overview:** Louis Leterrier's 2008 film served as the second entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, released two months after Iron Man. Edward Norton starred as Bruce Banner in this soft-reboot of the character following Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a stylized credits sequence that compresses the Hulk's origin into roughly three minutes of stills, headlines, and brief vignettes. Bruce Banner (Edward Norton), a brilliant biophysicist, is shown at a Culver University laboratory volunteering himself as a test subject for what he believes is a gamma-radiation experiment for the U.S. military's medical-applications program. The actual experiment, run secretly under General Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt), is a re-creation attempt of the World War II super-soldier serum that produced Captain America. The exposure transforms Banner into a green-skinned monstrous creature whose violence injures multiple personnel including Ross's daughter Betty (Liv Tyler), Banner's romantic partner. Banner flees and goes off-grid. The main story picks up five years after the credits sequence, with Banner living in a cramped Rocinha favela apartment in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He works at a soft-drink bottling plant under an assumed identity, sends encrypted emails to a mystery scientific contact called Mr. Blue, and trains daily with a slum-neighborhood jiu-jitsu instructor on aerobic-stress-reduction techniques. His goal is to find a cure for the gamma-radiation transformation that takes over whenever his pulse exceeds 200 beats per minute. A small accidental cut on his finger sends a single drop of his blood into a soft-drink bottle that ships to the United States, where General Ross's military intelligence team identifies the gamma-radioactive contamination and traces it back to Brazil. --- ### The Marvels (2023) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-marvels-2023.html **Director:** Nia DaCosta **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.7/10 **Lead cast:** Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Samuel L. Jackson **Synopsis:** Carol Danvers, Monica Rambeau, and Kamala Khan find their powers entangled, forcing them to work together whenever one of them uses their abilities — while battling a powerful Kree villain. **Plot overview:** Nia DaCosta's 2023 sequel paired Captain Marvel with the adult Monica Rambeau and the Pakistani-American teenage hero Kamala Khan, three women whose powers became cosmically entangled across an interstellar adventure. Below is the complete plot of the film, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the picture and intends to. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with three separate storylines establishing each of the three leads. Carol Danvers — Captain Marvel — is in deep space investigating a series of unstable wormholes that have been disrupting cosmic travel routes. Monica Rambeau, now a S.A.B.E.R. agent specializing in dimensional-energy phenomena (and the daughter of Carol's late best friend Maria Rambeau), is investigating a parallel anomaly from Earth's orbit. Kamala Khan, a sixteen-year-old Pakistani-American Captain Marvel superfan from Jersey City, has just received a mysterious bangle from her grandmother and is testing the strange light-construct powers it grants her in her bedroom. The three women suddenly switch places mid-action when their powers activate simultaneously, with Carol appearing in Kamala's bedroom, Kamala in Carol's spaceship, and Monica in the void of space. The three figure out that their entangled energy signatures are now linked: every time any of them uses their powers, all three swap locations. The mechanism is connected to the bangle Kamala wears and to the missing twin of that bangle, which has fallen into the hands of Dar-Benn — a Kree warrior commanding the remnants of the Kree Empire that Captain Marvel destabilized in her first solo film. Dar-Benn has been using the bangle to systematically tear cosmic resources from other planets to repair Hala, the Kree homeworld whose biosphere has collapsed since Carol's earlier intervention against the Supreme Intelligence. She blames Carol for the catastrophe and has dedicated her life to stripping other worlds of water, atmosphere, and starlight to feed Hala. --- ### The Mask (1994) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-mask-1994.html **Director:** Chuck Russell **Studio:** New Line Cinema **Universe:** Dark Horse **Source material:** Dark Horse Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.9/10 **Lead cast:** Jim Carrey, Cameron Diaz, Peter Riegert, Peter Greene **Synopsis:** A timid bank clerk discovers an ancient magical mask that transforms its wearer into a zany, unhinged, and nearly invincible trickster with extraordinary powers. **Plot overview:** Chuck Russell's 1994 film adapted Mike Richardson's Dark Horse Comics character into a coordinated continued-vehicle for Jim Carrey's coordinated continued-comedic-physical-performance work. The picture became one of the most-commercially-successful comic-book adaptations of the mid-1990s era. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in the fictional Edge City environment with the introduction of Stanley Ipkiss (Jim Carrey), a coordinated continued-mild-mannered bank-teller whose coordinated continued-personal-life is characterized by coordinated continued-pervasive-personal-frustration. Stanley's coordinated continued-professional-position at the broader Edge City First Bank has been substantially-stagnant; his coordinated continued-romantic-life has been substantially-empty; his coordinated continued-residence-arrangements with his coordinated continued-difficult-landlady has been substantially-unpleasant. His coordinated continued-only-emotional-engagement has been with his coordinated continued-pet Jack Russell Terrier dog Milo; their coordinated continued-personal-bond provides the picture's primary emotional-foundation. Stanley's coordinated continued-discovery of a coordinated continued-mysterious-wooden-mask floating in the coordinated continued-Edge-City-harbor-environment becomes the picture's primary supernatural-mechanism throughline. The coordinated continued-wooden-mask has been identified through coordinated continued-academic-research as a coordinated continued-ancient-Norse-artifact related to Loki, the Norse-mythology trickster-deity. The coordinated continued-mask's coordinated continued-deployment by a coordinated continued-mortal-wearer produces an unintended supernatural-transformation: the wearer's coordinated continued-personality-and-physical-aptitude are substantially-amplified to coordinated continued-superhuman-levels, with the broader-amplification combining coordinated continued-cartoonish-physical-aptitude and coordinated continued-uninhibited-personality-amplification. --- ### The New Mutants (2020) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-new-mutants-2020.html **Director:** Josh Boone **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.3/10 **Lead cast:** Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams, Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga, Blu Hunt **Synopsis:** Five young mutants are held in a secret facility against their will. As they struggle to cope with their abilities in this combination of superhero horror, they discover a sinister conspiracy. **Plot overview:** Josh Boone's 2020 film, originally produced in 2017 but delayed for nearly three years before theatrical release, was the final entry in Fox's X-Men franchise. The picture adopted a horror-genre approach distinct from the broader X-Men cinematic continuity. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with the introduction of Danielle Moonstar (Blu Hunt), a young Native American teenager whose Cheyenne reservation community is being destroyed by an unseen supernatural force. Danielle's father attempts to rescue her during the destruction but is killed during the escape. Danielle wakes up alone in a heavily-secured rural medical facility identified as a private psychiatric hospital. The facility's only staff member appears to be Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga), a soft-spoken physician who informs Danielle that her father is dead, that she is the sole survivor of the reservation incident, and that she has been admitted to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation pending an eventual transfer to the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. The hospital's patient population is limited to a handful of mutant teenagers, each of whom has been admitted for similar mutation-related psychiatric concerns. The other patients are introduced gradually: Rahne Sinclair / Wolfsbane (Maisie Williams), a Scottish lycanthropic mutant raised in a Christian-fundamentalist community; Sam Guthrie / Cannonball (Charlie Heaton), a coal-miner from Kentucky whose superhuman propulsion abilities had emerged during a mining accident that killed his crew; Roberto da Costa / Sunspot (Henry Zaga), a Brazilian solar-powered mutant whose pyrokinetic abilities had emerged during a romantic encounter that killed his girlfriend; and Illyana Rasputin / Magik (Anya Taylor-Joy), a Russian-emigré sorceress whose dark-magic abilities and obvious dislike of authority make her the group's most-volatile member. --- ### The Punisher (2004) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-punisher-2004.html **Director:** Jonathan Hensleigh **Studio:** Lionsgate **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.1/10 **Lead cast:** Thomas Jane, John Travolta, Will Patton, Laura Harring **Synopsis:** After undercover FBI agent Frank Castle's family is murdered by a crime boss, he becomes the vigilante Punisher, unleashing a personal war against his enemies. **Plot overview:** Jonathan Hensleigh's 2004 film starring Thomas Jane adapted Marvel's vigilante anti-hero Frank Castle into a Tampa-set revenge thriller. The picture rebooted the character following the 1989 Dolph Lundgren version and preceded the 2008 Punisher War Zone reboot. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with FBI agent Frank Castle (Thomas Jane) executing his final undercover assignment before his planned retirement. The operation is a stings the Saint family's arms-trafficking network in Tampa, Florida. Castle has been embedded for months under the alias Frank Castiglione and has finally arranged a buy-bust meeting at the Tampa docks. The bust succeeds operationally but ends in tragedy: during the firefight that follows the buyer-seller confrontation, the eldest son of mob boss Howard Saint (John Travolta), Bobby Saint (James Carpinello), is killed by a stray FBI bullet. Castle's role as the operation's lead agent is documented in the federal paperwork that survivors recover from the crime scene. Howard Saint's response is dictated by his wife Livia Saint (Laura Harring), whose grief over Bobby has hardened into demand for absolute revenge. The Saints learn through corrupt federal contacts that Frank Castle was the operation's lead. Howard and Livia decide that Castle's punishment must be total: not merely his death but the death of his entire family. The Saints hire mercenary muscle to track Castle to his family's annual reunion at a private beach property in Puerto Rico, where Castle has gathered his extended family of approximately twenty cousins, parents, his wife Maria (Samantha Mathis), and his young son. --- ### The Rocketeer (1991) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-rocketeer-1991.html **Director:** Joe Johnston **Studio:** Buena Vista Pictures **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.5/10 **Lead cast:** Bill Campbell, Jennifer Connelly, Alan Arkin, Timothy Dalton **Synopsis:** A young pilot stumbles onto a mysterious rocket pack and, with it, becomes a high-flying masked hero who battles Nazi spies and an actor with a dark secret. **Plot overview:** Joe Johnston's 1991 film adapted Dave Stevens's pulp-style comic-book character into a Disney-produced theatrical feature set in 1938 Los Angeles. The picture is widely regarded as a foundational work of the modern period-piece superhero genre. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in 1938 at the Bigelow Air Circuit in Los Angeles, where the young aviator Cliff Secord (Bill Campbell) and his elderly mechanic-partner Peevy (Alan Arkin) are preparing for an air-show-stunt-performance demonstration with their coordinated continued-air-racing-aircraft. The Bigelow Air Circuit has been their coordinated continued-source-of-income across multiple coordinated continued months of coordinated continued-aviation-stunt-engagement; their coordinated continued-financial-circumstances are precarious but stable. The opening establishes the picture's broader-1930s-aviation-cultural-context and Cliff and Peevy's coordinated continued-professional-relationship. Cliff and Peevy's coordinated continued-air-show preparation is disrupted by an unexpected-coordinated criminal-vehicle-chase across the broader airfield. The chase involves coordinated continued-gunmen pursuing a small coordinated continued-prototype-mechanical-device; the coordinated continued-criminal-vehicle-pursuit ends with the coordinated continued-prototype-device being hidden in Cliff and Peevy's coordinated continued-air-racing-aircraft's coordinated continued-mechanical-compartment. The coordinated continued-criminal-vehicle-pursuit-survivors flee the broader-airfield without recovering the coordinated continued-prototype-device. Cliff and Peevy's coordinated continued-personal-discovery of the prototype-device provides the picture's primary supernatural-mechanism throughline. --- ### The Suicide Squad (2021) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-suicide-squad-2021.html **Director:** James Gunn **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.2/10 **Lead cast:** Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone **Synopsis:** Supervillains Harley Quinn, Bloodsport, Peacemaker and a collection of misfit criminals are sent on a mission to the remote enemy-infused island of Corto Maltese. **Plot overview:** James Gunn's 2021 reboot-sequel of the Suicide Squad franchise was an R-rated war-comedy that established Gunn's tonal foundation for his eventual takeover of DC Studios as co-CEO in 2022. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens at the Belle Reve maximum-security prison, where ARGUS director Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) is briefing two Task Force X teams for a black-ops mission to the fictional South American island nation of Corto Maltese. The country has just undergone a military coup; the new ruling junta has seized control of a Cold War-era research facility called Jotunheim that may contain a U.S.-funded experiment Waller wants destroyed before the new regime can weaponize it. Both teams are made up of incarcerated supervillains coerced into the mission with the promise of reduced sentences and the threat of explosive head implants that detonate if they disobey orders or attempt to flee. The first team, led by the original Suicide Squad veteran Colonel Rick Flag, includes Savant (a wealthy crime-lover), the celebrity assassin Boomerang, the spear-and-javelin user Javelin, psychotic shapeshifter T.D.K. (whose only ability is to detach his own arms), the sentient infant-shark mutant Weasel, the punk Mongal (who can fly), and Harley Quinn (returning from the original Suicide Squad). Within minutes of the team's beach landing, the entire squad except Flag and Harley is wiped out by entrenched Corto Maltese military defenders. The whole opening sequence, establishing characters fans had been promised would be major roles, turns out to have been a deliberate distraction. Waller's actual mission belongs to a second team that has landed quietly on the opposite side of the island while the first team drew the enemy's fire. --- ### The Wolverine (2013) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/the-wolverine-2013.html **Director:** James Mangold **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.7/10 **Lead cast:** Hugh Jackman, Tao Okamoto, Rila Fukushima, Hiroyuki Sanada **Synopsis:** Logan travels to Japan to meet an old acquaintance and is offered the chance to be mortal again, but is pulled into a dangerous conflict involving the Yakuza and his own vulnerabilities. **Plot overview:** James Mangold's 2013 solo film took Logan to Japan for the closest faithful adaptation of the famous Chris Claremont and Frank Miller 1982 limited comic-book series, treating the character as a noir-thriller protagonist rather than a team-action lead. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. The film ranks among Hugh Jackman's strongest solo turns in the role. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in 1945 Nagasaki on the morning of the atomic bombing. A young Japanese soldier named Yashida is preparing to commit ritual suicide alongside his fellow soldiers when he sees an American flying figure in the sky. Logan — held in a deep prisoner-of-war pit in the camp — saves Yashida from the imminent atomic blast by pulling him into a covered well and shielding him with his own body and healing factor. The atomic flash incinerates the camp; Logan and Yashida emerge from the rubble, with Logan's body horrifically burned but already regenerating. Yashida watches Logan pull adamantium claws from his own forearms for the first time in their relationship. He never forgets this moment of being saved by an immortal stranger. Cut to the present day. Logan has been living as a hermit in the Yukon wilderness for years, processing the death of Jean Grey at the end of X-Men: The Last Stand (in this film's continuity, before that timeline was erased by Days of Future Past). He has nightmares of Jean nearly every night. A small Japanese woman named Yukio finds him at a remote bar and informs him she has been sent to bring him to Tokyo. Yashida, now an aging billionaire on his deathbed, has requested to see Logan one final time before he dies. Logan reluctantly travels to Japan. Yashida tells him he has built a chamber that can transfer Logan's healing factor to himself, allowing the dying patriarch to live. Logan refuses. --- ### Thor (2011) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/thor-2011.html **Director:** Kenneth Branagh **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7/10 **Lead cast:** Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins **Synopsis:** The arrogant Asgardian warrior Thor is banished to Earth, stripped of his powers, and must prove himself worthy to reclaim his magical hammer Mjolnir and stop his brother Loki's schemes. **Plot overview:** Kenneth Branagh's 2011 introduction of the Norse god to the MCU balanced Shakespearean family drama with cosmic spectacle. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens on a stormy desert highway in New Mexico. Astrophysicist Jane Foster, her mentor Erik Selvig, and their intern Darcy Lewis are tracking unusual atmospheric phenomena when a celestial energy surge slams down to earth, knocking their van off the road. Out of the smoke walks a tall, golden-haired man in armor. He is barely conscious. Cut to a flashback narration: thousands of years ago, the realm of Asgard — home to Earth's Norse gods — battled the Frost Giants of Jotunheim for control of the Nine Realms. Odin Allfather, Asgard's king, ended the war by stripping the Frost Giants of their planetary power source: the Casket of Ancient Winters. He locked it in Asgard's vault and exiled the Frost Giants to their barren homeworld. The truce held for millennia. In present-day Asgard, Odin's elder son Thor is being prepared for coronation as the next king. The ceremony is interrupted when several Frost Giants infiltrate the vault attempting to steal the Casket. Asgard's mechanical guardian destroys the intruders, but Thor — arrogant, hot-headed, eager for combat — demands retaliation against Jotunheim. Odin refuses, declaring the truce too valuable to break. Thor disobeys. Together with his brother Loki, his lover-fighter friends Sif, Volstagg, Fandral, and Hogun, he leads an unauthorized strike on Jotunheim. The fight goes catastrophically wrong. The Frost Giant king Laufey nearly kills the entire party. Odin arrives in a thunderstorm to extract them, but the truce is shattered. Furious at his son's recklessness, Odin strips Thor of his powers and his enchanted hammer Mjolnir, banishing him to Earth. Mjolnir is also exiled, encased in stone — only one worthy of its power can lift it. --- ### Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/thor-love-and-thunder-2022.html **Director:** Taika Waititi **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.2/10 **Lead cast:** Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson **Synopsis:** Thor embarks on a soul-searching journey to find inner peace but his retirement is interrupted by Gorr the God Butcher, a galactic killer who seeks the extinction of the gods. **Plot overview:** Taika Waititi's 2022 follow-up to Ragnarok reunited Thor with Jane Foster against a god-killing antagonist. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a backstory sequence on a desolate alien wasteland. A man named Gorr is dying alongside his small daughter, who succumbs to dehydration in his arms. Gorr drags himself across the dunes praying to the god he had served his entire life — Rapu, a callous deity who appears casually in a hidden oasis surrounded by feasting servants. Rapu mocks Gorr's grief and dismisses prayers as worthless. Gorr stumbles upon the cursed weapon called the Necrosword — a sentient blade that slowly corrupts its wielder while granting them godlike powers. Gorr kills Rapu with it and swears to murder every god in the universe. He becomes Gorr the God Butcher. Cut to Thor, having spent the years since Endgame traveling with the Guardians of the Galaxy across countless cosmic conflicts. The Asgardian refugees — having lost their homeworld in Ragnarok — have settled into a small Norwegian fishing village called New Asgard, ruled by Valkyrie. The village has become a tourist destination, with Asgardian battle cries reenacted for visiting cruise ship passengers. New Asgard receives a distress signal: Gorr's invasion has reached their world. Thor returns urgently. Meanwhile, on Earth, Jane Foster has been diagnosed with stage IV cancer. She has refused treatment that involves toxic chemicals, despite her doctor's urging, and has been pursuing a desperate experimental therapy: locating Mjolnir, Thor's shattered hammer (broken by Hela in Ragnarok), which has been stored in pieces at New Asgard. --- ### Thor: Ragnarok (2017) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/thor-ragnarok-2017.html **Director:** Taika Waititi **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.9/10 **Lead cast:** Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Tessa Thompson, Mark Ruffalo **Synopsis:** Thor is imprisoned on the other side of the universe and must race against time to return to Asgard to stop Ragnarök — the destruction of his home — from the hands of his powerful sister Hela. **Plot overview:** Taika Waititi's reinvention of the Thor franchise turned the character into a comedy lead and saved the Asgardian sub-franchise. Full plot, in our own words. Spoilers throughout. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with Thor suspended in chains in a fiery underworld realm called Muspelheim, captive of the demonic giant Surtur. Surtur boasts that he will fulfill the prophecy of Ragnarok — the destruction of Asgard — when his crown is reunited with Asgard's Eternal Flame. Thor, monologuing to himself in mid-fight, escapes, defeats Surtur, takes the giant's crown back to Asgard, and locks it away in the vault, satisfied that Ragnarok has been averted. He returns home expecting a hero's welcome. Instead, he finds Asgard at peace under what appears to be his father Odin's leadership. Statues of Loki — supposedly dead — have been erected. Plays mocking Thor's heroics are performed in the streets. Thor immediately suspects something is wrong. He confronts Odin, who under Thor's pressure reveals himself to be Loki. The trickster has been ruling Asgard in disguise for years, having sent the real Odin into hiding on Earth. The brothers travel to New York to retrieve their father. Loki's stay at a sanitarium dissolves abruptly when Doctor Strange — the new Sorcerer Supreme of Earth — intervenes and refuses to let Loki on the planet. Strange teleports the brothers to the Norwegian coast where Odin has been quietly waiting for them. Odin tells his sons that he is about to die, and that his death will release something he has long imprisoned: their elder sister Hela, the Goddess of Death. He passes peacefully into the light. From the air above the cliffs, Hela emerges — armored, antlered, and immensely powerful. --- ### Thor: The Dark World (2013) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/thor-the-dark-world-2013.html **Director:** Alan Taylor **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.9/10 **Lead cast:** Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Christopher Eccleston **Synopsis:** Thor must battle an ancient race of Dark Elves led by the vengeful Malekith, who seeks to use an ancient weapon called the Aether to plunge the universe into eternal darkness. **Plot overview:** Alan Taylor's 2013 sequel reunited Thor with Jane Foster against an ancient elven threat and introduced the Reality Stone. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a flashback narrated by Odin. Thousands of years before the Asgardians' rise, the universe was ruled by the Dark Elves of Svartalfheim under their king Malekith. The Dark Elves wielded a primordial weapon called the Aether — a fluid, parasitic substance that could rewrite reality itself. Asgard's first king Bor, Odin's father, defeated Malekith by destroying his fleet during the Convergence, a once-every-five-thousand-years cosmic alignment when all Nine Realms briefly intersect. Bor sealed the Aether deep in a hidden vault and believed the Dark Elves to be extinct. Malekith and a small remnant survived in suspended animation in a hidden ship. Cut to the present, two years after The Avengers. Thor has spent the time restoring order across the Nine Realms after the destruction of the Bifrost. He returns to Asgard a war hero. His father Odin pressures him to take the throne, marry the Asgardian noblewoman Sif, and put aside his Earth-bound entanglements. Thor refuses to forget Jane Foster. On Earth, Jane has been searching for cosmic anomalies in London with her intern Darcy Lewis. They detect an unexplained gravity disturbance at an abandoned industrial warehouse in East London. Jane investigates — and is pulled through a portal connecting to the hidden Aether's vault. The Aether floods into her body, bonding with her cells, and gives her the temporary power to rewrite reality at the molecular level. --- ### Thunderbolts* (2025) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/thunderbolts-2025.html **Director:** Jake Schreier **Studio:** Marvel Studios **Universe:** MCU **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.5/10 **Lead cast:** Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, David Harbour **Synopsis:** A group of supervillains and antiheroes — Yelena Belova, Bucky Barnes, Red Guardian, U.S. Agent, Ghost, and the mysterious Sentry — are forced into an unlikely team for a deadly mission that could reshape the MCU's understanding of who gets to be called a hero. **Plot overview:** Jake Schreier's 2025 film assembled the MCU's first anti-hero ensemble team, drawing characters from Black Widow, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, and Ant-Man and the Wasp into a single dysfunctional black-ops squad. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), now a paid assassin working under quasi-legitimate CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), executing a contract kill at a remote Malaysian research facility. The mission is presented as a routine extraction of an experimental biological sample, but Yelena begins to suspect that she has actually been used to eliminate a witness who might have been able to publicly testify about Valentina's classified projects. The opening sets the film's tone: a series of morally compromised individuals, each working for Valentina under different forms of coercion, slowly realizing that they are all expendable. Valentina's broader scheme is gradually revealed across the film's first half. She has been running a classified CIA program (project Sentry) that produced a single super-soldier asset named Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman), a depressed and chemically-dependent young man whose body has been augmented with experimental molecular-energy modifications designed to make him the most powerful physical asset on Earth. Bob is unstable, both psychologically (his chronic depression has worsened post-augmentation) and physically (his energy outputs are unpredictable). Valentina has been preparing Bob as her hidden trump card while quietly disposing of the various contractors who knew about the program, fearing congressional oversight. --- ### V for Vendetta (2006) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/v-for-vendetta-2006.html **Director:** James McTeigue **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 8.1/10 **Lead cast:** Hugo Weaving, Natalie Portman, Stephen Rea, John Hurt **Synopsis:** In a fascist future Britain, a masked revolutionary known only as V embarks on a campaign of anarchistic attacks against the authoritarian government, enlisting a young woman named Evey. **Plot overview:** James McTeigue's 2006 adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd's 1980s graphic novel set the original story in a dystopian near-future Britain. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with parallel introductions to its two leads. Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), a young production assistant at a state-controlled British television network, is sneaking out past the after-curfew streets of London. The United Kingdom of the near-future has become a totalitarian theocratic surveillance state under the rule of High Chancellor Adam Sutler (John Hurt), who came to power years earlier following a domestic biological-weapons crisis. Curfew enforcement is brutal. Evey is intercepted by a small Fingermen patrol in a back alley, who attempt to assault her. A masked figure intervenes. The masked man, known only as V (Hugo Weaving), wears a stylized Guy Fawkes mask, a dark cloak, and twin daggers. He dispatches the Fingermen with theatrical efficiency, then escorts Evey to a London rooftop where the Old Bailey courthouse is rigged with explosives. V's first public act is the destruction of the Old Bailey at midnight on the fifth of November, accompanied by his hijacking of the city's emergency broadcast system to proclaim a year-long campaign against the Sutler government. The broadcast announces that he will return to detonate the Houses of Parliament on the same date one year hence, and invites the British people to join him. Evey, having accidentally witnessed the Old Bailey demolition, is taken into V's underground lair (an extensive Shadow Gallery filled with confiscated cultural artifacts the regime has banned: paintings, books, records, films) for her own protection. Their relationship will form the film's emotional core. --- ### Venom (2018) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/venom-2018.html **Director:** Ruben Fleischer **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.6/10 **Lead cast:** Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Scott Haze **Synopsis:** Eddie Brock, a journalist who bonds with an alien symbiote, becomes Venom — an anti-hero who must protect his host in a battle against a more sinister symbiote called Riot. **Plot overview:** Ruben Fleischer's 2018 film starred Tom Hardy as investigative journalist Eddie Brock, who becomes the unwitting host of an alien symbiote that grants him superhuman abilities. The picture launched Sony's Spider-Man Universe of films featuring Spider-Man supporting characters without Spider-Man himself. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a Life Foundation space probe returning to Earth after recovering four alien symbiote organisms from a comet near the Earth's orbit. The probe crashes in Malaysia rather than its intended landing site; one symbiote escapes during the crash and possesses the body of a paramedic named Maria. Maria's symbiote-possessed body kills several first-responders before being captured by Life Foundation security teams under the direction of Dr. Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), the company's billionaire-CEO whose private fortune funds the symbiote research. The recovered symbiote and the surviving three are transported to Life Foundation's San Francisco headquarters for study. Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is introduced as a once-respected San Francisco investigative journalist whose career has crashed following his recent firing from the Daily Globe. Eddie's fianceé Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), a corporate attorney working for a firm that represents the Life Foundation among other clients, has just left him after his off-record use of confidential client information for an aggressive Drake interview that destroyed both their careers and their relationship. Eddie's daily life has degenerated into apartment-bound depression, occasional convenience-store visits, and aggressive phone-conversations with Anne's voicemail. --- ### Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/venom-let-there-be-carnage-2021.html **Director:** Andy Serkis **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.3/10 **Lead cast:** Tom Hardy, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Williams, Naomie Harris **Synopsis:** Eddie Brock attempts to restart his career by interviewing serial killer Cletus Kasady — who becomes Carnage after bonding with a symbiote, leading to an explosive showdown. **Plot overview:** Andy Serkis's 2021 sequel continued Tom Hardy's Eddie Brock and Venom partnership while introducing Woody Harrelson's Cletus Kasady / Carnage as the primary antagonist. The picture's mid-credits sequence brought Venom into the Marvel Cinematic Universe through the multiverse-disruption events of Spider-Man: No Way Home. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive flashback to 1996 at the Saint Estes Home for Unwanted Children, a brutal juvenile-detention facility where young Cletus Kasady has been incarcerated for an unspecified violent crime. Cletus's romantic relationship with another young inmate, Frances Barrison, is interrupted when Frances is transferred to the Ravencroft Institute for the Criminally Insane following the discovery of her sonic-scream mutant abilities. Cletus is unable to follow her transfer; their separation, dramatized as the film's emotional foundation for Cletus's later revenge campaign, sets the stage for the present-day conflict. The main story picks up several months after Venom's events. Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is now a quietly-employed local crime journalist whose continued symbiote partnership with Venom has been domesticated into household routines: Eddie cooks raw-meat meals for Venom; Venom complains about Eddie's failure to allow them to consume actual criminals; both negotiate over Eddie's apartment décor, his exercise habits, and his ongoing emotional unavailability. The opening establishes the film's tonal pivot toward broader-comedy material than the original picture, a deliberate creative choice from director Andy Serkis to lean into the Eddie-Venom buddy-comedy dynamic. --- ### Venom: The Last Dance (2024) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/venom-the-last-dance-2024.html **Director:** Kelly Marcel **Studio:** Sony Pictures **Universe:** Sony Spider-Verse **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6/10 **Lead cast:** Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans **Synopsis:** Eddie and Venom are on the run, hunted by both worlds and backed into a corner with no choice but a devastating decision that will bring their inseparable bond to an emotional end. **Plot overview:** Kelly Marcel's 2024 directorial debut concluded the Tom Hardy-led Venom trilogy with the introduction of Knull, the symbiote-species creator-deity, and the broader cosmology of the Klyntar symbiote homeworld. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with extensive cosmic-establishing footage of Klyntar, the symbiote homeworld, where the eternal entity Knull (Andy Serkis, voice and motion-capture) has been imprisoned within a planet-sized stone-construct cell by the symbiote-collective's leadership for hundreds of millennia. Knull's ancient grievance against the symbiote-collective is that he created the entire species and now believes the species owes him release and his subsequent rule of the universe. Knull has been preparing his escape for centuries by deploying a class of symbiote-hunter creatures called Xenophages, which feed on individual symbiote bodies and accumulate symbiote-life-essence that Knull can collect at scale to power his eventual escape. The film's main plot picks up immediately after the Spider-Man: No Way Home credits sequence, with Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom returning to their original timeline after being briefly multiverse-displaced. Eddie discovers that he is now a federal fugitive on Earth-616: federal authorities investigating Detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham, who first appeared in Let There Be Carnage) have linked Mulligan's symbiote-related death to Eddie. The federal task force investigating the Carnage events is led by Special Agent Sadie Christmas (Juno Temple), an idealistic but inexperienced symbiote-research specialist whose academic-paper publications have established her as the agency's leading symbiote scientist. --- ### Vikrant Rona (2022) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/vikrant-rona-2022.html **Director:** Anup Bhandari **Studio:** Shalini Artss **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Bollywood **Audience rating:** 6.2/10 **Lead cast:** Kichcha Sudeep, Jacqueline Fernandez, Nirup Bhandari **Synopsis:** A mysterious police officer arrives in a fog-shrouded village plagued by supernatural occurrences and a serial killer, using wit and extraordinary skills to unravel a decades-old secret. **Plot overview:** Anup Bhandari's 2022 Indian Kannada-language fantasy-action film starred Kichcha Sudeep in a coordinated continued-investigative-thriller narrative set in a remote Indian-coastal-village environment. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in the remote coordinated continued-coastal-village environment of Kamarottu in the late 1970s, where the broader-village-community has been suffering coordinated continued-mysterious-supernatural-phenomena across multiple coordinated continued-months. The coordinated continued-supernatural-phenomena include coordinated continued-unexplained-civilian-disappearances, coordinated continued-environmental-disturbance-events, and coordinated continued-traditional-cultural-ritual-disruption incidents. The coordinated continued-broader-village-community's coordinated continued-administrative-response has been substantially-limited by the coordinated continued-geographic-isolation of the broader-village-environment from the broader-Indian-administrative-system. The picture's protagonist Vikrant Rona (Kichcha Sudeep) is introduced through his coordinated continued-arrival at Kamarottu as a coordinated continued-new-police-officer-deputation. His coordinated continued-arrival-mission involves the coordinated continued-investigation of the broader-village's coordinated continued-supernatural-phenomena and the coordinated continued-elimination of the broader-supernatural-source. Vikrant's coordinated continued-investigative-aptitude has been substantially-developed through his coordinated continued-prior-police-officer career-engagement; his coordinated continued-personal-mannerisms include a coordinated continued-fedora-hat, a coordinated continued-yellow-overcoat, and a coordinated continued-tactical-walking-cane (visual references that the picture deliberately positions as homages to the broader-classic-detective-genre). --- ### Wanted (2008) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/wanted-2008.html **Director:** Timur Bekmambetov **Studio:** Universal Pictures **Universe:** Independent **Source material:** Independent **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.7/10 **Lead cast:** James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Common **Synopsis:** A frustrated office worker discovers his father was an elite assassin. He's recruited into the secret society of killers and undergoes brutal training that transforms him into a deadly weapon. **Plot overview:** Timur Bekmambetov's 2008 film adapted Mark Millar's 2003 comic-book miniseries into a coordinated continued-American-cinema commercial-action production starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, and Angelina Jolie. The picture became one of the most-significant commercial-action-cinema productions of the late 2000s era. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in coordinated continued-Chicago-environment with the introduction of Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), a coordinated continued-mid-career-accountant-civilian whose coordinated continued-personal-life is characterized by coordinated continued-pervasive-personal-frustration. Wesley's coordinated continued-professional-position has been substantially-stagnant; his coordinated continued-romantic-relationship with his coordinated continued-girlfriend Cathy has been substantially-deteriorated by her coordinated continued-secret-engagement with his coordinated continued-best-friend Barry; his coordinated continued-personal-anxiety-and-emotional-overwhelm produces coordinated continued-pervasive-panic-attack episodes across multiple coordinated continued-daily-life situations. Wesley's coordinated continued-routine-Chicago-environment-engagement is unexpectedly disrupted by his encounter with Fox (Angelina Jolie), a coordinated continued-mysterious-coordinated-female-assassin whose coordinated continued-personal-engagement with Wesley substantially-disrupts his coordinated continued-civilian-life patterns. Fox's coordinated continued-direct-engagement with Wesley occurs at a coordinated continued-Chicago-grocery-store-environment, where Fox conducts a coordinated continued-direct-rescue-engagement of Wesley from a coordinated continued-assassin-pursuit. The coordinated continued-grocery-store-rescue-engagement provides the picture's primary first-act extended action sequence. --- ### Watchmen (2009) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/watchmen-2009.html **Director:** Zack Snyder **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DC Classic **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.6/10 **Lead cast:** Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson, Malin Åkerman, Billy Crudup **Synopsis:** In an alternate 1985 America on the brink of nuclear war, a group of retired masked heroes investigates the murder of one of their own, uncovering a world-changing conspiracy. **Plot overview:** Zack Snyder's 2009 adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's seminal graphic novel translated one of the most-influential comic-book stories in history into a 162-minute theatrical film. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in an alternate-history 1985 New York City. The United States has won the Vietnam War with assistance from a superhuman called Doctor Manhattan; Richard Nixon is serving an unprecedented fifth presidential term; the Cold War is approaching nuclear catastrophe; costumed vigilantes have been outlawed by the Keene Act for nearly a decade. A retired vigilante named Edward Blake, formerly the violent government-aligned hero called the Comedian, is murdered in his Manhattan apartment, thrown through his high-rise window after a brutal struggle. The opening title sequence, set to a contemporary song selection, depicts the alternate-history rise and fall of America's costumed-vigilante movement across four decades through a series of stylized tableaux. Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a still-active masked detective who refuses to comply with the Keene Act's outlawing of vigilantes, investigates Blake's murder despite the police having no leads. Rorschach wears a constantly-shifting black-and-white inkblot mask that he calls his face, and narrates the film through a journal he keeps. His investigation suggests that someone is systematically eliminating retired masked heroes. He visits the surviving members of the original Watchmen team to warn them: Daniel Dreiberg / Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), an obese-aging-into-flabby suburban widower who has retired into hobby-electronics; Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), the world's smartest man who unmasked himself publicly years ago and has built a billion-dollar peace-promotion business empire; Laurie Juspeczyk / Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), the daughter of a previous Silk Spectre who has been romantically involved with Doctor Manhattan; and Jon Osterman / Doctor Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a fully blue-skinned godlike physicist who can manipulate matter at the quantum level. --- ### Wonder Woman (2017) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/wonder-woman-2017.html **Director:** Patty Jenkins **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.4/10 **Lead cast:** Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Connie Nielsen, Robin Wright **Synopsis:** Diana, princess of the Amazons, trained to be an unconquerable warrior, leaves her island home after an Allied spy crash-lands on their shores and tells of a great war in the outside world. **Plot overview:** Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman became the highest-grossing live-action film directed by a woman (at release) and proved the DCEU could deliver a critical hit. Full plot, in our own words. Spoilers ahead. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film is framed as a flashback. In present-day Paris, Diana Prince — historian at the Louvre — receives a delivery from Wayne Enterprises: a black briefcase containing an old photographic plate from the Great War. The image shows Diana herself, in armor, standing among four men in a Belgian village in 1918. Diana writes a thank-you note to Bruce Wayne and sits down to remember. On the hidden island of Themyscira, sometime in the modern era but visually evoking ancient Greece, an entire warrior society of immortal Amazons lives in isolation. The story of how they came to be is recounted in fresco paintings: Zeus created mankind to live in love and harmony, but the war god Ares poisoned humanity's heart with envy and conflict. Zeus crafted the Amazons as protectors and gave them an island hidden from men's sight, plus a secret weapon — the "Godkiller," capable of slaying Ares himself. Princess Diana, daughter of Queen Hippolyta, grew up there as the only child on the island. Hippolyta forbade her training as a warrior; Diana's aunt General Antiope trained her in secret anyway, and eventually Hippolyta relented. --- ### Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/wonder-woman-1984-2020.html **Director:** Patty Jenkins **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 5.4/10 **Lead cast:** Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal **Synopsis:** Diana faces two new foes in the 1980s: the charismatic Max Lord, who gains the power to grant any wish at a terrible price, and her colleague Barbara Minerva who becomes Cheetah. **Plot overview:** Patty Jenkins's 2020 follow-up to Wonder Woman returned Diana to the 1980s for an ambitious but divisive sequel. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a flashback to Diana's youth on the hidden Amazonian island of Themyscira. A young Diana (Lilly Aspell) is competing in an elaborate Amazonian olympiad against adult competitors, navigating an obstacle course that includes archery, horseback riding, ledge-climbing, and underwater swimming. She is winning by considerable margin until she takes a shortcut to compensate for a fall, missing a critical checkpoint. Antiope, her aunt and combat trainer, disqualifies her for the cheat. The lesson, Antiope tells her, is that no true victory comes from a deception; greatness requires honesty even when it costs you. The lesson will become the film's thematic core. Cut to 1984 Washington, D.C. Diana (Gal Gadot) lives quietly as an antiquities curator at the Smithsonian Institution while occasionally intervening in petty crime as Wonder Woman, including a memorable mall-set sequence where she rescues mall-goers from an attempted jewelry heist. She still mourns Steve Trevor, who died in 1918. A new colleague at the Smithsonian, gemologist Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), befriends Diana. Barbara is socially awkward, professionally undervalued, and quietly resents Diana's effortless beauty and confidence. The Smithsonian receives a stolen artifact from a recent black-market jewelry heist Diana herself disrupted: a citrine-colored stone called the Dreamstone. --- ### X-Men (2000) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/x-men-2000.html **Director:** Bryan Singer **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.3/10 **Lead cast:** Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry, Famke Janssen **Synopsis:** In a world where mutants exist, two groups clash: Professor Xavier's X-Men who seek peaceful coexistence, and Magneto's Brotherhood who fight for mutant supremacy. **Plot overview:** Bryan Singer's 2000 film launched the modern superhero film era, proved comic-book adaptations could be serious commercial properties, and established the foundation of what would become the longest-running superhero franchise in cinema history. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film and intends to. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a wordless sequence in a 1944 Polish concentration camp. A young Jewish boy is being separated from his parents at the camp gate. As the soldiers drag him away, his outstretched hand twists the metal gate behind him, bending the steel into impossible shapes. The boy's name is Erik Lehnsherr, and he has just discovered his ability to control magnetic fields. Cut to the present day, somewhere in the American Midwest, where a teenage girl named Marie has just kissed her boyfriend for the first time and put him in a coma. Marie's skin absorbs energy, memories, and (in the case of mutants) powers. She runs away from home, terrified of what she might do to anyone she touches. On a separate track, Logan — a man with no memory before fifteen years ago, possessing a healing factor and adamantium claws hidden beneath his skin — is competing in cage fights at a small Canadian bar. He picks up Marie hitchhiking. Their truck is attacked on the road by Sabretooth, a feral mutant assassin. Logan and Marie barely escape and are extracted to a hidden mansion in upstate New York: Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, an academy and refuge for young mutants. Charles Xavier, the school's founder and the world's most powerful telepath, explains everything. Mutants are a new genetic species emerging across the globe. The world has been quietly debating whether to register, restrict, or persecute them. Senator Robert Kelly, a politician on the rise, has been campaigning for mandatory mutant registration with intent to escalate to internment. --- ### X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/x-men-origins-wolverine-2009.html **Director:** Gavin Hood **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.7/10 **Lead cast:** Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston, Ryan Reynolds **Synopsis:** Logan's turbulent past is revealed — from his early days as a mutant in the 19th century through his time with Team X, and the Weapon X experiment that bonded adamantium to his skeleton. **Plot overview:** Gavin Hood's 2009 prequel was a critical and commercial disappointment that the franchise would later canonically erase via Deadpool 2's time-travel retcon, becoming one of the most cautionary tales of comic-book filmmaking in the modern era and the franchise's most thoroughly disowned entry. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. The film's failures shaped the franchise's subsequent direction in significant ways. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in 1845 Northwest Territories of Canada. A young James Howlett, born to a wealthy estate-owning family, witnesses his father's murder in a violent confrontation. The killer is an estate groundskeeper named Thomas Logan — who, the dying man reveals, is James's actual biological father. James, in shock, manifests retractable bone claws from his hands for the first time and kills Thomas Logan in fury. He flees the estate alongside Thomas's other son Victor Creed, who is also a mutant — a feral healing-factor predator. The two boys, biologically half-brothers, run together and survive across the wilderness. An extended montage sequence traces the brothers across multiple wars. Together they fight in the American Civil War. Together they fight in World War I. Together they fight in World War II — landing on Normandy on D-Day. Together they fight in Vietnam, where Victor's escalating brutality leads to him attempting to assault a Vietnamese woman. James pulls him off and kills several U.S. military police in the resulting fight. The two are court-martialed and sentenced to a firing squad. Their healing factors absorb the bullets; they walk out of the post-execution body bag unharmed. Colonel William Stryker, observing from a discrete distance, has been documenting them. He recruits both into his black-ops Team X. --- ### X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/x-men-apocalypse-2016.html **Director:** Bryan Singer **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.9/10 **Lead cast:** James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar Isaac, Sophie Turner **Synopsis:** The world's first mutant, Apocalypse — resurrected after thousands of years — assembles a team of powerful mutants to destroy the world and rebuild it in his own image. **Plot overview:** Bryan Singer's 2016 follow-up to Days of Future Past confronted the X-Men with an ancient godlike mutant from the dawn of civilization and introduced the new generation of franchise leads — Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, and Nightcrawler in their younger forms — who would carry the prequel-era films forward into the Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix entries. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with a flashback to 3600 BC Egypt. En Sabah Nur — the world's first mutant, capable of transferring his consciousness into a new mutant body to absorb their abilities — is preparing his fifth body transition in a sealed pyramid chamber. His four chief acolytes attempt to assassinate him during the transition, sealing him beneath the collapsing pyramid. He is preserved in deep stasis for thousands of years. Cut to 1983, where Egyptologist Moira MacTaggert (returning from First Class) discovers the buried pyramid's hidden lower chamber and accidentally triggers Apocalypse's revival. He emerges into the modern world powerful, ancient, and convinced that contemporary civilization is hopelessly weak. He intends to wipe humanity out and rebuild society around enhanced mutants under his rule. On a separate track, Erik Lehnsherr has been hiding in Poland under an assumed name with a wife and young daughter. Local authorities discover his identity after he uses his powers to save a colleague at a steel mill. The local police arrive at his house with the goal of arresting him. The confrontation goes catastrophically wrong: Erik's wife and daughter are killed in the chaos. Erik's grief detonates into an enormous magnetic discharge that levels his village. Apocalypse, sensing the disturbance, recruits him as one of his Four Horsemen. The other three are Storm (a young thief from Cairo), Psylocke (a former Hellfire Club assassin), and Angel (an aging gladiator-fighter rescued from a German cage circuit). Apocalypse enhances each of their powers significantly through bodily contact. --- ### X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/x-men-days-of-future-past-2014.html **Director:** Bryan Singer **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.9/10 **Lead cast:** Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen **Synopsis:** The X-Men send Wolverine back in time to the 1970s to prevent a catastrophic event: the assassination that triggered the creation of the Sentinels, relentless mutant-hunting machines. **Plot overview:** Bryan Singer's 2014 return to the X-Men franchise united the original cast and the First Class prequel cast through an ambitious time-travel storyline that effectively rebooted the entire series, erased The Last Stand from canon, and gave Hugh Jackman one of his best Wolverine appearances in his decade-spanning run with the character. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens in a dystopian 2023. Sentinels — massive shape-shifting robots designed to identify and exterminate mutants — have systematically hunted nearly all of mutantkind to extinction. Ordinary humans suspected of carrying the mutant gene are also being eliminated. The Sentinels have been engineered to adapt to any mutant power. The remaining X-Men, including Charles Xavier, Magneto, Storm, Wolverine, Iceman, Bishop, Sunspot, Blink, Warpath, and Kitty Pryde, have been hiding in a Chinese monastery. Kitty has discovered a way to use her phasing powers to send a person's consciousness backward in time into their younger body, allowing them to alter the past. Their plan: send someone back to 1973 to prevent the assassination that triggered the Sentinel program. The assassination in question was the killing of military scientist Bolivar Trask by Mystique. Trask had been developing the Sentinel program; his death convinced the U.S. government to fund and accelerate it. Mystique was captured at the assassination scene, her DNA was harvested, and her shape-shifting genome was used to create the Sentinels' adaptable architecture. To prevent this future, someone must travel back fifty years and stop Mystique. Only Wolverine has a healing factor capable of withstanding the months-long mental disruption such a deep time-travel would require. He volunteers. Kitty sends Logan's consciousness back to his 1973 body in a New York hotel. --- ### X-Men: First Class (2011) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/x-men-first-class-2011.html **Director:** Matthew Vaughn **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.7/10 **Lead cast:** James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne **Synopsis:** Before Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr took the names Professor X and Magneto, they were two young men discovering their powers — and the story behind their fateful friendship and bitter rivalry. **Plot overview:** Matthew Vaughn's 2011 prequel reset the X-Men franchise to 1962 and introduced the younger Charles, Erik, and the original X-Men's origins through a Bond-style Cold War espionage register that gave the franchise a complete tonal reset. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film and intends to. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with an extended flashback to 1944 in occupied Poland, expanding the original X-Men's opening scene. A young Erik Lehnsherr has just demonstrated his magnetism powers at the camp gate. The local SS officer Klaus Schmidt — who specializes in mutant-research — locks Erik in a chamber, brings his mother in front of him, and threatens to kill her if Erik cannot demonstrate his powers on command. Erik cannot. Schmidt shoots Erik's mother dead in front of him. The pain triggers a massive magnetic reaction that destroys most of the camp's metal structures. Schmidt watches with delight, recognizing he has unlocked Erik's full power. Cut to the early 1960s. Erik is hunting Schmidt across the world, having become a Nazi-hunting vigilante. On a separate track, an adult Charles Xavier (still walking, his paralysis decades away) is a charismatic Oxford-educated geneticist studying mutant-related anomalies. His foster sister Raven — a young blue-skinned shape-shifter the audience knows as the future Mystique — has been with him since childhood. The two are recruited by CIA agent Moira MacTaggert to help her identify what appears to be a covert mutant network operating around the Cuban Missile Crisis. The investigation leads them to the Hellfire Club, a high-society organization run by Sebastian Shaw — who is, in fact, the same Klaus Schmidt who killed Erik's mother in 1944. Shaw has been collecting and training mutants to position himself to trigger and survive a global nuclear war. --- ### X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/x-men-the-last-stand-2006.html **Director:** Brett Ratner **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 6.8/10 **Lead cast:** Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellen, Kelsey Grammer, Famke Janssen **Synopsis:** The emergence of a 'mutant cure' sparks a war between the X-Men, Magneto's powerful army, and the renegade Jean Grey now reborn as the virtually omnipotent Dark Phoenix. **Plot overview:** Brett Ratner's 2006 trilogy closer was a divisive but commercially successful film that ended the original X-Men cast's arc. Below is the complete plot, told in our own words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with two flashbacks. In the first, twenty years before the present, Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr arrive at the suburban home of a young Jean Grey to recruit her for the X-Men. Jean is twelve, levitating cars and rearranging her room without touching anything. Xavier and Lehnsherr are friends in this period, before their split. In the second flashback, ten years before the present, a teenage Warren Worthington III is found by his father attempting to amputate the wing-stubs growing from his back. The boy will become Angel. The film cuts to the present, one year after the Alkali Lake incident from X2. Jean Grey is dead. The X-Men have been mourning her for twelve months. Storm is teaching at the school. Cyclops has not recovered. A new development changes everything: Worthington Industries has announced a cure for the mutant gene. Derived from a young mutant named Leech who absorbs nearby mutant powers as a side effect of his own ability, the cure can permanently strip a mutant of their genetic identity. The U.S. government has funded the program, and the cure will become voluntarily available within months. The mutant community is split. Some — including Rogue, who has spent years unable to physically touch anyone — see the cure as liberation. Others, led by Magneto, see it as the first step toward forced de-mutation. Magneto begins assembling a militant Brotherhood army. --- ### X2: X-Men United (2003) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/x2-x-men-united-2003.html **Director:** Bryan Singer **Studio:** 20th Century Fox **Universe:** X-Men Universe **Source material:** Marvel Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.5/10 **Lead cast:** Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Brian Cox, Alan Cumming **Synopsis:** The X-Men must fight alongside Magneto's Brotherhood against the ruthless military scientist William Stryker, who plans to use an amplified mutant-detection device to destroy all mutants. **Plot overview:** Bryan Singer's 2003 sequel deepened the X-Men's mythology and is widely considered one of the greatest superhero films ever made, frequently ranked alongside Spider-Man 2 and The Dark Knight as a high-water mark for the entire genre. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film and intends to. **Plot summary (first acts):** The film opens with one of the genre's most iconic action sequences: a teleporting blue-skinned mutant named Kurt Wagner — Nightcrawler — has somehow infiltrated the White House and is sprinting through the corridors trying to reach the President of the United States. He is in a fugue state, controlled by an unknown influence. Secret Service agents fire at him; he teleports between shots, leaving behind sulfurous puffs of smoke. He reaches the Oval Office, attempting to assassinate the President with a knife. He is wounded by a Secret Service shot moments before he can complete the act. The film cuts to the X-Mansion, where Charles Xavier has been monitoring the attack via Cerebro. The political fallout will be enormous: a mutant attempted to assassinate the President of the United States. On a separate track, Logan has spent months investigating the abandoned Alkali Lake facility in the Canadian Rockies — the place where his memories trace back fifteen years. He has found nothing useful. He returns to the X-Mansion to inform Xavier his investigation has dead-ended. The school is in routine: Cyclops and Jean Grey teaching, Storm running a flight class, students playing in the lounge. The political pressure following the Nightcrawler attack arrives fast. Colonel William Stryker — a charismatic high-ranking U.S. military officer with a long history of mutant-research projects — secures an executive order from the President to investigate Xavier's school as a potential mutant-terrorist network. Stryker's strike force assaults the mansion in the middle of the night, sweeping through dormitories, capturing students, and stealing classified Cerebro data. --- ### Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021) **URL:** https://moviesoncomics.com/movies/zack-snyder-s-justice-league-2021.html **Director:** Zack Snyder **Studio:** Warner Bros. **Universe:** DCEU **Source material:** DC Comics **Language:** Hollywood **Audience rating:** 7.9/10 **Lead cast:** Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher **Synopsis:** Zack Snyder's definitive four-hour vision of Justice League — a more complete and darker story of Earth's mightiest heroes assembled to face the threat of Steppenwolf and Darkseid. **Plot overview:** Released in 2021 after a multi-year fan campaign, Zack Snyder's Justice League restored the director's original four-hour vision of the Justice League's formation, with significantly different plot beats and characterization than the 2017 theatrical release. Below is the complete plot of the picture, told entirely in our own original words. Heavy spoilers throughout for anyone who has not yet seen the film and intends to do so. **Plot summary (first acts):** The Snyder Cut opens with an extended sequence depicting Superman's death scream at the end of Batman v Superman. The sound waves travel across the planet and through the underground Mother Box artifacts that have been hidden for millennia, awakening them. The first Mother Box, hidden by the Amazons on Themyscira, glows. The second, hidden by the Atlanteans, glows. The third, hidden in a Smallville barn alongside a Kryptonian scout ship, glows. The activation summons Steppenwolf, who has been exiled from Apokolips for an unspecified treachery and seeks to restore his standing with his master Uncle Darkseid by completing the Unity that Darkseid had been unable to complete during his prior visit to Earth thousands of years before. Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) is recruiting metahumans across the globe. He visits Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) in a Norwegian fishing village, where Arthur silently rescues a stranded fisherman before disappearing into the sea. He visits Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) in a Central City pet store where Barry is working as a clerk between forensic-science classes. He visits Victor Stone (Ray Fisher) at a Gotham housing complex where Victor has been hiding from his estranged father, the S.T.A.R. Labs scientist Silas Stone. Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) joins the recruitment effort independently after the Amazonian Mother Box is taken in a brutal Themysciran assault that kills several Amazons including Hippolyta's general lieutenant. --- ## About Movies on Comics Movies on Comics (https://moviesoncomics.com/) is an independent editorial database covering comic-book cinema across all studios, languages, and continuities. All plot summaries are written in our own original prose, synthesizing widely-known plot facts. Editorial team: Movies on Comics Editorial Contact: see https://moviesoncomics.com/about.html File generated: 2026-05-11