Random DC Movie

What this list is

Look at this list and you are looking at something the other big superhero list is not: an unbroken run of films across almost sixty years, made under wildly different plans, that keep starting the same characters over from scratch. It is a history of reboots, and that history is more interesting than it sounds.

Press Generate and it hands you one. A few from the list:

• Superman (1978)
• Batman (1989)
• Batman & Robin
• The Dark Knight
• Wonder Woman
• Joker
• Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
• Superman (2025)

Notice how many times the same few names recur, remade, recast, reimagined. There are multiple Supermen in that list, multiple Batmen, made decades apart with no connection between them. That is not a failure. It is a different relationship to continuity than its rival chose, and both the cost and the freedom of it are worth understanding.

Drawing a film

1. Press Generate for one film.
2. Ask for a few to pick from across the decades.
3. Type into Contains to search the titles.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where these titles come from

Films based on this comics publisher's characters, gathered and checked by hand across nearly six decades. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

These characters are much older than their rivals

It is easy to forget, in an age when one superhero franchise dominates, that these particular heroes came first, by a wide margin.

The two most famous characters on this list were created in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They are among the very first superheroes, the templates from which most of the genre was copied. The armoured heroes of the rival universe came decades later, in the 1960s, in part as a response to characters like these. When you watch one of these films you are watching the oldest layer of the entire genre, the point where the idea of the costumed hero was more or less invented.

That age is a blessing and a burden. A blessing, because these characters are woven so deeply into culture that everyone already knows them; you do not have to explain who the man of steel is. A burden, because everyone has their own idea of who these characters are, formed over eighty years of comics, cartoons, television and film, and any new version has to argue with all of them. A character nobody knows can be whatever the film needs. A character everyone knows comes with eight decades of expectation attached.

The genre where the story keeps starting over

Here is the pattern that makes this list unusual, and it comes straight from the comics these films are based on.

Comic-book characters do not age and do not end. A character created in 1938 is still published today, which means the same figure has been written continuously for the better part of a century, by hundreds of different hands, through changing times and tastes. No single continuous story could survive that. So the comics learned to do something films are only now catching up to: they reboot. Periodically, the whole history is wiped or rewritten, the character is started fresh, and the origin is told again for a new generation, keeping what still works and discarding what has aged badly.

These films inherited that logic. The same character gets a definitive film, and then a decade later gets another definitive film that ignores the first, with a new actor, a new tone, and a fresh telling of the same origin. Multiple Batmen. Multiple Supermen. Not sequels to each other, but replacements, each one saying: forget the last version, here is ours.

To an outsider this looks like chaos, and sometimes it is. But it is also a genuine and rather honest response to an impossible situation. These characters are older than any actor's career, older than any single vision. Reboots are how a story with no natural end keeps from dying: you do not extend it forever, you begin it again. The list above is a record of that beginning-again, over and over, across generations.

Why the shared universe did not take the second time

When the rival studio's shared universe became the most profitable thing in cinema, this studio, understandably, wanted one too. What happened next is a useful lesson in why the model is harder than it looks.

The rival had built its universe slowly, one standalone film at a time, over years, letting audiences come to love each character before bringing them together. This studio, arriving late and eager to catch up, tried to compress that. Rather than patiently establishing each hero alone, it moved quickly toward the big team-up, introducing several major characters in a hurry and leaning hard on setting up future films.

It did not take. The films that rushed to assemble the team, before audiences had reason to care about each member, were received poorly, and the grand plan faltered. The studio kept changing course. It stepped back from tight interconnection, then leaned into standalone films that deliberately sat outside any shared world, one of which, a dark character study with no universe attached at all, became one of the most acclaimed films the whole genre has produced. Eventually the studio rebooted the entire enterprise again, handing it to new leadership to start over.

The lesson everyone drew is the one the rival had proven from the other direction: a shared universe cannot be a shortcut. It only works if each film stands on its own first, and the connections are a reward rather than the point. Skip the patient part and the whole structure has nothing to stand on. The story of this studio's attempt is the clearest evidence of what the successful model actually required, told through what happens when you leave that part out.

The freedom in not sharing a world

There is a real upside to all this starting-over, and it is worth ending on, because it is easy to see only the mess.

A shared universe is a golden cage. Once every film must fit one continuity, no single film can fully be its own thing. A director cannot kill a character who is needed for next year's crossover, cannot tell a story that contradicts the shared timeline, cannot fully commit to a tone that clashes with the house style. Everything must serve the whole, and the whole is enormous and unending.

A tradition built on reboots and standalone films escapes that cage. Because these characters get remade rather than continued, a filmmaker can take one of them and do something singular, knowing it does not have to connect to anything. This is why some of the most distinctive superhero films ever made sit on this list: a stark, operatic take on the caped detective; the acclaimed character study that answers to no universe at all. Freed from the obligation to fit, a film can commit completely to one vision.

So the two lists represent two genuinely different bets. One chose continuity, and gained a vast interconnected saga at the cost of any single film's independence. The other kept starting over, and gained the freedom to make strange, complete, standalone films at the cost of a coherent whole. Neither is simply right. The reboots that look like indecision are also what make room for a filmmaker to take one of the oldest characters in the genre and make it entirely their own.

Questions people ask

Do these films connect to each other?

Some do and many deliberately do not. Unlike its rival, this tradition contains multiple separate continuities plus a large number of standalone films that connect to nothing. The safest assumption is that any two films are unrelated unless they clearly signal otherwise.

Why are there so many different Batmen and Supermen?

Because the characters are remade rather than continued. They are far too old and too valuable to leave to a single version, so each generation gets its own, told fresh, ignoring the ones before. It mirrors exactly what the source comics have always done.

Is there an order to watch these in?

Only within each self-contained series. Across the whole list there is no single timeline to follow, so the sensible approach is to pick a particular version of a character and watch that run, rather than trying to thread them all together.

Which era is the best?

That is exactly the kind of question this tradition is built to keep alive, because there is no single canonical version to settle it. Different generations hold different films as definitive, and the constant remaking means the argument never closes, which is arguably the point.

References

1. DC Extended Universe, on the attempt to build a shared universe in response to its rival and the retreat from tight interconnection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Extended_Universe
2. DC Universe (franchise), on the soft reboot under new leadership and the contrast drawn with the rival studio's approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Universe_(franchise)