Studios know audiences know Superman and the Fantastic Four, so they’re letting these heroes have more storytelling freedom.
There’s a repeating theme across 2025’s major superhero movies—Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, Superman, and Fantastic Four: First Steps. All four have interesting, sometimes conflicting relationships with time and how far along their characters are into their superhero tenures, making these movies simultaneous continuations and introductions.
Time has always been a key part of superhero movies, and it used to be that their starting points could be whenever a creative team chose. In 1978, Superman could be an origin story, while 1989’s Batman could take place at a nebulous (but still early) time in his career, and that was that. Both the latter and 1998’s Blade happen after the characters have realized their identities, but they also touch on their respective origins—an efficient way to help newcomers dive in. This approach persisted in the early 2000s with Daredevil, X-Men (to a point), and Constantine, while other heroes like Spider-Man and the Hulk came to the silver screen to have their beginnings told.
After Batman Begins became a hit in 2005, “origin” was the word of the day, and it wasn’t long before we were seeing how James Bond, the crew of the Enterprise, and plenty more came to become as we know them. It actually took superheroes a little longer to get on board, but time had to matter once cinematic universes began taking off: Green Lantern, Iron Man, Captain America, the list of origins is well-documented. During the 2010s, some of the most interesting experimentation with this formula came from team movies; Black Panther technically never gets an origin in either Captain America: Civil War or his 2018 solo movie, and Ant-Man is both an origin and pseudo-legacy sequel (in spirit more than anything). Meanwhile, the 2016 Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy had characters who came in pre-formed but gave us plots about the beginnings of one or more characters; Harley Quinn & the Birds of Prey can’t really exist without the building blocks established by Squad, and the first and third Guardians are directly about how Peter Quill and Rocket became as we first see them.
