For those who enjoy films based on comic book superhero characters we appear to are living in a golden age. With Marvel Studios releasing 10 big budget box office films so far, all set in the same universe, the hugely successful Christopher Nolan / Christian Bale Batman series and what some people have said might be too many Spider-Man movies. We've also had the 7 X-men movies, the Fantastic Four adaptations.  and a couple of Superman films, the second of which is awaiting a Batman vs Superman sequel as DC attempt to replicate the success of Marvel's Cinematic Universe.

It seems like every other major summer action movie is a superhero movie recently, but it hasn't always been that way. There were some reasonably successful Superman and Batman movies in the 80’s and 90’s but nothing like what we are seeing today.

Looking through the timelines at the box office results for the different films I found some interesting facts. Although the Avengers broke multiple records in 2012 it was the Dark Knight, in 2008, that become the first Super Hero film to break $1bn at the box office. The current trend can possibly be traced back to the X-men film released in 2000, although not an extraordinary success it did do very well taking almost $300 million at the box office and spawning 7 sequels and prequels to date. The first massively successful superhero film though was Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man film starring Toby Maguire in the title role. The film took $821 million at the box office, making it the first superhero film to exceed half a billion dollars.

Embedded timelines are read-only, click on the  icon to open the timeline on the main site for full controls and all the features.

Films based on DC Comics

 Films based on Marvel Comics

Merging Timelines

I embedded the Marvel and DC timelines separately above so they can be compared to each other, but if you want to see all the films on one timeline you can easily merge timelines on Histropedia . The idea is that instead of saving every possible combination of timelines to the directory you can easily create any combination you desire, allowing you to build Lego with History.

To merge timelines you simply open the first timeline you want to merge, click replace if the replace or merge option is displayed. Then open the second timeline you want to merge and this time click merge. Don't worry if the second timeline opens in a new tab, the two timelines will still be merged. Learn more here.

Why not try merging some of the related timeline below, maybe to just show Superman and Batman movies, which would of course the upcoming Superman vs Batman film.

Related Timelines