Rank the Superman Animated Films

[Matt Parker]

So, with Man of Tomorrow having been out for half a year, how would my fellow Superman fans rank his solo animated flicks and why? Here are the movies I am including.

Superman: Brainiac Attacks
Superman: Doomsday
Superman/Batman: Public Enemies
Superman/Batman: Apocalypse
All Star Superman
Superman vs The Elite
Superman Unbound
Death of Superman
Reign of the Supermen
Superman: Man of Tomorrow

Let me know if I left one off.

Personally, I would go

1) Superman: Man of Tomorrow which I think is the modern Superman reboot we deserve and I think has a script worthy of a live action film.

2) Death of/Reign, which does a great job at distilling the great parts of the original story and updating the dated elements (bizarre JLA lineup, Aussie Lex, Matrix Supergirl).

3) Superman vs the Elite, which is such a cool exploration and validation of Clark's morals.

4) Public Enemies, which is just a wild ride with two of my favorite comics characters.

5) Unbound, which is basically the Superman vs Brainiac feature I've always craved.

6) All Star, which is pretty good but feels kinda watered down compared to the comic.

7) Apocalypse, which is ok but not as strong as the first movie IMO.

8) Doomsday, which is pretty darn fun but suffers from having a far superior version of the same story come out 10 years later that made it irrelevant.

9) Brainiac Attacks, which I think is plain bad.

What does everyone else thing? Honestly, I enjoy the first 3 of these more than any live action Superman film aside from the original. Also, let me know if there's an obvious one I left out.

[OpaqueGiraffe17]

1. Death of Superman: really kickass streamlined version of fight.
2. All Star Superman: it cuts a lot of stuff out, but still really good!
3. Reign of Superman: besides one really dumb moment, really good follow up!
4.Man of Tonorrow: the ending was all over the place with Parasite, but the first half was really good
5. Apocolaspe: not great but it got the batman/superman dymanic mostly right
6. Unbound: I remember enjoying it. Don't remember much else.
7. Public enemies: meh didn't like the animation style

[Vakanai]

1. Superman: Man of Tomorrow - Best origin we've had on film. What Man of Steel in the DCEU should've been.

2. Superman vs the Elite - Once you get past the weird designs and style they went with, this is the best Superman action film to date.

3. Death of Superman - It's not fair to include Reign of the Supermen when ranking this movie. Separately this film is hands and shoulders far superior and better than Reign. It took the story that frankly has been done poorly and too often in the past decade or so and made it worthwhile and respected again.

4. Superman Unbound - Just for the best appearance of Brainiac ever. And Supes pwns him.

5. Superman Batman: Public Enemies - a wild guilty pleasure buddy cop movie with two of the greatest characters of all time.

6. Superman Batman: Apokolips - It's fun, just not as crazy cool as Public Enemies.

7. Superman Doomsday - Death has done it better.

8. Reign of the Supermen - Superboy is totes cool or however the kids say it, but otherwise is kind of just an average movie.

9. All Star Superman - I get the desire to want to rank this higher just because of love for the comic, but the film really kind of proves that it was just too episodic to adapt well into a 75-ish minute movie. It could have made a great mini-series event, but as a film it's sort of lacking.

10. Brainiac Attacks - I don't think it's as bad as people say, I enjoyed it for what it was, but it's still the most bottom of the barrel of all of them easy.

[Vakanai]

Reading over the list, I wish DC would do more with him like they do Batman. I know, I know, Batman is the golden child and Superman is suffering from second child syndrome with DC despite being the firstborn, but I wish Superman could get a team up with Scooby Doo, or a crossover with another iconic property like The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or team up with more DC heroes like the Batman Unlimited movies, or get an anime like Batman Ninja, or even just get his own LEGO focused/titled movie like Flash, Aquaman, Shazam, and Batman have...

Don't get me wrong, Superman has better/more showings than all other DC heroes not named Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman fans all envy the amount of films Superman still gets. But I still wish we could get more of these secondary weirder cool side deals outside the main animated film line like Batman gets. It can't be that hard to get one every now and then...

Also, ranking the Justice League films for Superman content...

1. JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time - This film just flat out respects Superman as the leader of the JLA and his importance to history in a major way. All the JLA are kind of secondary/supporting characters to the two Legion of Superheroes crossing over, but still as a Superman fan you just gotta love the love and respect Supes gets here.

2. Justice League: War - A tie with Son of Batman for worst DC animated movie overall in my opinion, but there's no denying Superman is treated as the heavyiest hitter and most generally badass member.

3. Justice League Dark: Apokolips War - Sadly, Superman kind of helped screw the pooch in the first little bit that led to **** going south. But the rest of the film showed a greatly depowered Clark doing stuff, and being kind of awesome-ish, so it balances a bit.

4. Justice League: Throne of Atlantis - He pwned a kraken Cthulhu beastie and that scene where he showed up Bat's "detective" by being best investigative journalist and superspeeding that paper back together was cool.

5. Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths - There's not much to say here, I don't think he even gets to defeat Ultraman (although he did seem to be winning). But he still has a good showing overall, which oddly seems to be a bit of an ask from several other of these JL films...

6. Justice League: Doom - He had a few good scenes, but him getting shot by a kryptonite bullet again after Public Enemies just unduly annoys me somehow...and it's by Metallo again!

7. Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox - Pre-Flashpoint Supes just calmly holding that bomb and being all chill like "The waiting is the hardest part" was cool, but skinny traumatized lab-rat Superman in Flashpoint world is just too sad...

(Note that this was only my ranking on the films based on how Superman was in them - a ranking based on my enjoyment of them would look radically different.)

Frankly, Clark needs better scenes in these Justice League movies. He's treated much better in the LEGO DTVs. Well, outside Gotham City Breakout...

[DochaDocha]

Don't have a real ranking list. Just going to post some assorted ramblings.

8) Doomsday, which is pretty darn fun but suffers from having a far superior version of the same story come out 10 years later that made it irrelevant.

You're correct about Doomsday's issues. If you never watched these movies and you're reviewing the back library to see which movies you want to watch, it makes a lot of sense to skip Doomsday in favor of Death of Superman. But if you're just listing the flaws of each movie, you have to mention that a huge problem with Death of Superman is that Doomsday exists.

I think the biggest problem with these Superman animated movies is that because they focus on the modern-day comics, making movies based on relatively recent Superman stories, they excluded essentially the first 65 years of Superman's history. However, they made an exception for "Death of Superman," just not once but twice. Even though Death of Superman was a well-done movie, the combination of breaking their policy of sticking to relatively recent source material and redoing the same story 11 years later creates some dissonance and is kind of disappointing. Then again, these two are the best-selling movies in the line, so we know the decision wasn't made randomly...

I rate All-Star Superman pretty highly. I obviously love the comic, and the comic is better than the movie, but the movie has the added benefit of improving the ending. I think most of the Timm-era Superman movies had a recurring issue of taking some element of the comic story and making it worse in the adaptation. Doomsday obviously has its problems that don't need reiteration, but the two Superman/Batman movies took the Superman aspect and made it less interesting. Public Enemies probably started out as a comic book that was 65% Superman and 35% Batman, but the movie is probably more like 55%/45% respectively, which is good for balancing the heroes but bad if you want a pure Superman story. Apocalypse's original ending was mostly about Superman and Darkseid's history, but to make Supergirl more involved, its movie ending makes Superman's participating less interesting. That's probably good if you wanted Supergirl more involved in the end, but I think it means Superman's portion of the story gets watered. So, when I look at those four Superman movies from the Timm's tenure, I have a softer spot for All-Star even though it's less thorough of an adaptation than either S/B. All-Star is just far more complicated in adapting into a movie, but I think they did a good job relative to the restrictions, and made a key (albeit, non-faithful) improvement. the S/B movies took stories that were well-suited for adaptations, but made some dissatisfying alterations that I think made the stories less interesting for Superman fans, with the kicker that those changes didn't need to be made like that for the sake of adaptation.

Reign was the only real redeeming factor for remaking "Death of Superman," but just like how the non-comic world only paid attention to Death and largely ignored the follow-up stories, Reign didn't bring in nearly as many viewers. It also was not as good Death, which made that duad of movies fall short of their potential.

I have mixed feelings on Elite and Unbound. Elite is fine story-wise, but it falls miserably short in visual and audio standards. It feels like so many shortcuts were made to produce it, and unfortunately that probably led to some of its poor sales. Unbound I didn't think was bad, but it sold just as badly as Elite, if not worse, that I think they didn't do a good job of hyping that movie, especially since Brainiac became a hotter commodity thanks to the DCAU and DCUO. I guess I can't help but feel unmet expectations for these movies, so I'm not hyper keen on either.