Here are all eight Superman movies ranked worst to best, including the brand-new James Gunn version starring David Corenswet as the Man of Steel and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane.
A couple caveats: We aren’t incuding animated movies, or Justice League, for reasons we’ll get into.
And with that, here are all eight Superman movies ranked, in order from worst to best.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
Henry Cavill is a terrific Superman, but he was frankly underserved by the scripts for the films in which he played everyone’s favorite Kryptonian.
The worst by far was Batman v Superman, a loud, messy, overblown affair that saw him facing off with Ben Affleck’s similarly underserved Batman — and they both had the movie stolen out from under them by Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman.
The nadir of Cavill’s turn as Superman was Justice League, which featured several scenes in which his face is marred by by the digital removal of the mustache Cavill was sporting for the excellent Mission: Impossible — Fallout, which was shooting at the same time Justice League did reshoots.
But we aren’t including Justice League on this list because Superman is dead for much of the movie.
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)
No one is saying Superman IV is a good movie — it suffered from a slashed budget and a terrible new villain, Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow), as well as a preachy plot about the evils of nuclear weapons. The special effects were bad at times. And the film’s disappointing box office returns buried the Christopher Reeve-led version of the Superman franchise.
But Superman IV has its charms. First of all, there’s Reeve, by far the best actor to play Superman so far. And at least we got truncated appearances by the late, great Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor and Margot Kidder as Lois Lane. It’s also weird and fun that Jon Cryer pops up as Lex’s nephew, Lenny Luthor.
And, in a roundabout way, this movie helped shoot Morgan Freeman to stardom. No, he’s not in the movie. But Reeve agreed to make Superman IV in exchange for a green light for the gritty drama Street Smart, in which Morgan Freeman stole the show as a pimp who clashed with Reeve’s character, a reporter.
Superman Returns (2006)
This attempt to reboot the Superman franchise suffered against two comparisons: First, as likable as Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth were as Superman and Lois, it’s very hard to follow Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder.
Second, the film came out a year after Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale very successfully rebooted Batman with Batman Begins, the start of their Dark Knight trilogy.
Still, we like Superman Returns. Kevin Spacey was a good pick for Lex Luthor, and we love how this movie can be seen as a direct sequel to Superman II — with new leads, of course — that imagines Superman III and Superman IV never happened.
Man of Steel (2013)
Director Zack Snyder tried to make Man of Steel (which came out a year after the final film in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, and included Nolan as a producer) as epic as possible, and succeeded in many ways.
Henry Cavill was exceptionally well cast as Superman, and Amy Adams was an excellent modern-day Lois Lane. The stacked supporting cast included Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Clark’s adopted earth parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, and Russell Crowe and Ayelet Zurer as Jor-El and Lara Lor-van, the Kryptoanian biological parents of Superman (aka Kal-El). The dads got a lot more to do than the moms.
The main weakness of the film was Snyder’s insistence on making things too dark and gritty, culminating in the much-debated decision to have Superman kill Michael Shannon’s General Zod. That still doesn’t feel like a thing Superman would or should do.
Superman III (1987)
This is Superman at his silliest. He faces off with the forgettable industrialist Ross Webster (Robert Vaughn), who employs the movie’s real attraction, Gus Gorman, a desperate but brilliant computer programmer played by Richard Pryor.
There’s incredible time-capsule appeal in seeing the straitlaced Reeve share the screen with the unpredictable Pryor, one of the most influential comedians of all time. And it’s also fun to see how a 1983 film portrayed Gus’ computer genius. (His moneymaking scheme was elegant and memorable enough to have received an homage in 1999’s Office Space.) We also like the goofy but fun splitting of Superman into good and evil personas.
The film loses points for the absence of Gene Hackman and the sidelining of Margot Kidder, who was upset at producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind for the decision to replace Superman director Richard Donner on Superman II with Richard Lester. We prefer Superman movies where Lois is front and center.
Superman II (1980)
Plot-wise, this is the most compelling of all Superman movies, because it goes to the central question of whether he wants to be human, or an alien superhero trying to save us from ourselves. It’s the most romantic superhero movie ever made.
Realizing that he can’t be Superman and married to Lois, Clark Kent gives up his super powers. But he’s forced to don the cape once again when three villains cast out from Krypton early in the original Superman movie suddenly come to Earth: General Zod, perfectly played by Terence Stamp; his similarly icy second-in-command, Ursa (Sarah Douglas); and the mute and mighty Non (Jack O’Halloran).
Superman II is thrilling, but tragic. And, if you were a kid when it came out, it was genuinely scary: What could be worse than a world without Superman?
Superman (1978)
This is the film that created the modern superhero movie — a stunning, charming, goodhearted epic that takes it sweet time living up to its tagline, “You’ll believe a man can fly.”
It’s slow by modern standards, but who cares? We love inhabiting the world it creates, one that combines solid 1970s moviemaking with a Metropolis out of the 1940s and a version of Kansas that feels like something in a Terrence Malick film. The film rockets from a dying utopia, imbued with grandeur by Marlon Brando as Jor-El, and takes us to an optimistic version of America distinct from the grit and pessimism of other ’70s films.
Anchoring it all is Christpher Reeve as a Superman who exudes decency — as well as plenty of dry wit. The movie centers around Lois Lane — the skeptical audience surrogate — falling in love with him. And Superman falling in love with her.
Add in Gene Hackman, as a conniving Lex Luthor who is as ruthless as Superman is sincere, and you have a classic — the best Superman movie so far. We love Richard Donner’s controlled, assured direction, and the fact that the film enlisted Godfather writer Mario Puzo to tell a very different kind of family story.
The new Superman movie, coming July 11 from James Gunn, incorporates John Williams’ stirring, triumphant score, and we hope it can also capture the heart of the 1978 Superman, our favorite Superman movie by far.
Superman (2025)
That’s right — we’ve loved Superman movies for almost as long as we’ve been alive, and consider James Gunn’s latest version to be the best of all.
This movie is a flat-out stunner. And yes, it should be noted that it had a big advantage over all the other Superman movies on this list: It gets to borrow and build on everything they did right, and learn from their mistakes. The way the film expands on John Williams’ soaring 1978 Superman score is a good encapsulation on how it expands on 87 years of Superman lore — it takes the central themes, finds new ways to play them, and makes everything feel fresh and vital.
Gunn stands on the shoulders of giants and does them proud.
The new Superman has jokes, thrills, and soul, and Gunn finally cracks the problem of all Superman movies: How do you make a man with incredible powers relatable? Gunn does it by making him a stranger in a strange land — ours — who tries to keep up even as he falters, again and again.
The chemistry between David Corenswet’s striving Superman and Rachel Brosnahan ‘s punk-rock Lois Lane feels as real as we’ve seen between any screen couple in years. And a speech at the end about why we should treat all human beings as human beings brought a tear to this cynical writer’s eye.
Superman has epic moments, but also a light touch, and Gunn fills the screen with delights. He seems to have found maybe the most perfect use of CGI we’ve seen in a movie: Rather than using it to badly recreate elements of real-life, as so many CGI-driven movies do, he uses it to create visions we would never otherwise see, particularly in a standout “pocket universe” sequence.
There are some stunning parallels with the world today — some of which Gunn couldn’t possibly have planned on during production — but people who think it’s some kind of woke jeremiad are out of their minds. Superman is a movie for anybody with a heart.
Liked This List of All 8 Superman Movies Ranked From Worst to Best?
You might also like our list of Every Indiana Jones Movie Ranked from Worst to Best, or this list of Rad ’80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.
Main image: David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan in Superman. Warner Bros.