James' World 2

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Daniela Fernandez, a social services worker in Nevada City, California, successfully ran for city council in 2020, thinking she’d focus on fire preparedness and water security. After the murder of George Floyd that May, when Fernandez came out publicly to support Black Lives Matter protesters, she became a target of in-person and online harassment.

Since then, she says, her citizenship has been publicly challenged and she’s faced protests organized via Facebook groups. She’s been harassed in public so often, including from people driving by her house or parking in front of her home, that she now owns a firearm and has installed a security camera. “In a town of 3,000, when people know where you live, that’s pretty terrifying,” says Fernandez, who said she’s not backing down.

In recent years, local officials in the US — from mayors and city council members to school board members and election workers — have increasingly been the target of organized harassment, threats, and even violence. Experts point to several factors fueling the trend, including growing political polarization, the ripple effects of former President Donald Trump’s scheme to discredit the 2020 presidential election, and the anger and conspiratorial anxieties that accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is met by police officers as she leaves her home in January 2022.  Photographer: Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

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When Action Comics No. 1 hit newsstands in June of 1938 and readers met Krypton’s number-one-son Superman, it was a big-bang event that kicked off what would become the Great American Superhero Obsession. Naturally, the movies wanted in on this craze as well. Thus, a few years later, serials like The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), Batman (1943), and Captain America (1944) became matinee staples; even the Man of Steel would get his own 15-part adventure in 1948. Later, these comic-book characters would get co-opted by this newfangled invention called “television,” and you could tune in watch George Reeves move faster than a speeding bullet, Adam West and Burt Ward zap-blam-pow their way through a who’s-who of Bat-villains and Bill Bixby go from mild-mannered drifter to a raging green hulk. Don’t even get us started on Saturday morning cartoons.

By the time superheroes started making their way back to the big screen in the late 1970s and the 1980s, these defenders of truth and justice had become universally recognized icons — you didn’t have to be a comic-book reader to know what that black-and-yellow bat insignia meant, or understand that a red mask with white eyes and a web design equaled your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. And when the one-two punch of the first X-Men movie and Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man hit theaters within a few years of each other, the stage was set for the first part of the 21st century to give birth to what’s now a Golden Age of Superhero Movies.

So, after having navigated several cinematic universes and traveled through a host of multiverses, fought infinity wars and played endgames, rode shotgun with webslingers and prowled alongside dark knights, and hung with so many supergroups that we’ve practically become charter members, we’ve ranked the top 50 superhero movies of all time. From the campy to the grimdark, the late nights in Gotham City to the sunrises in Wakanda, these are the films that both define the genre and have helped turn the thrill of watching comic-book characters leap onto the screen into a multiplex lingua franca.

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Illustration by Matt Cooley. Photographs in Illustration; 20th Century Studios/Everett; Warner Bros/Everett; Pixar/Disney; Clay Enos/Warner Bros; Sony Pictures/Everett Collection; Marvel Studios; Everett Collection; 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios; Warner Bros/Everett Collection

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For years now, we have been bombarded with hand-wringing headlines proclaiming that the pandemic would set working mothers back a generation or drive them out of the labor market in droves, as the infamous second shift metastasized into a third, fourth, and fifth, requiring them to homeschool, cook, clean, and look after their children nonstop. But as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman admitted last month, “The Great Resignation now looks like a Great Misunderstanding.” More than three out of four women were part of the labor force in November 2021 — precisely the same percentage as in November 2018. Despite the viral QuitTok videos and lengthy meditations on “anti-ambition” or why work sucks, quitting is not financially feasible for most mothers. In reality, most women — especially those with college degrees who could afford child care —hung on, often by their fingernails, “and persevered,” according to Harvard economist Claudia Goldin. These women emerged from the COVID-19 hellscape with hard-won proof that, despite the crushing domestic burdens brought on by quarantine, they could be as efficient with flexibility as with fixed office hours. Some could even be more productive because of the time saved by forgoing commutes or having to show up simply to show their faces.

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Photo-Illustration: Th Cut; Photos: Getty

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