Top 10 R-Rated Superhero Movies

With Blade burning up the charts on Max, conversation on social media has inevitably turned to that old question: what’s the deal with R-rated superheroes? They’re a lot less uncommon than they used to be, with movies like Logan and Deadpool earning big bucks while The Suicide Squad was so warmly received that it seemingly got James Gunn a job actually running DC. In any case, it’s been a long journey from the days of Dolph Lundgren’s The Punisher being denied a theatrical release in the U.S. We figured before Deadpool 3 can be finished, it’s as good a time as any to look back at the best R-rated movies based on superhero comics.

“We know about the way cowboy films went, and the way war films went,” Gunn told The Irish Times in 2021. “I don’t know, I think you don’t have to be a genius to put two and two together and see that there’s a cycle to those sorts of films, you know and that the only hope for the future of the comic book and superhero films is to change them up. They’re really dumb. And they’re mostly boring for me right now.

“I loved them at the beginning. I was really excited when they first started making those movies. It was about the visual effects when I saw Superman as a kid. I still love that movie,” he continued. “Okay, I know, that’s a guy on wires and bluescreen with this sort of crappy visual effects. And then when Iron Man came out, I was in. You’re able to make a guy fly around who looks like a guy flying around. And that was a beautiful thing to be able to do. But if the movies don’t change, it’s gonna get really, really boring.”

He isn’t alone; around the time Joker came out, a survey claimed superhero fans are eager for more R-rated movies.

(We were originally going to do both movies and TV, but there were so many good candidates, we’re going to separate them out so as not to leave any glaring, obvious omissions off the list.)

In the past, we’ve done this by polling the staff, or by counting up our users’ ratings on our internal rating system. This time around, it’s an amalgamation that includes looking back at old lists, looking at our audience’s ratings, and looking at Rotten Tomatoes scores, among other things. But it’s all opinion! Feel free to sound off in the comments below, or hit up @comicbook on social media platforms to tell us what you think we missed.

Honorable Mention: Batman: Soul of the Dragon

Batman: Soul of the Dragon likely wouldn’t even register with most fans. The direct-to-home animated movie was highly stylized, featuring Batman in a movie inspired by ’70s kung-fu flicks and featuring a lot of the aesthetics of those movies.

Featuring great voice acting by David Giunutoli, Michael Jai White, and Mark Dacoscos, the movie was an oddball entry in DC’s animated catalog, but was also one of the more surprising and entertaining entries in that series.

Joker

Here’s the thing about a list like this: it’s hard to draw lines. Yeah, Blade doesn’t wear a costume, but he’s clearly engaged in superhero stuff. What about Constantine? What about…well…Joker?

Joker is not a superhero movie. Even its filmmakers owned up to the fact that they were basically capitalizing on the superhero craze to make a character-driven drama that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten them a budget.

Still, this is an acclaimed, award-winning movie that uses one of the most iconic characters in superhero fiction as its primary character. It deserves at least a spot on the list.

Birds of Prey

Cathy Yan’s ambitious, violent, and sometimes vulgar superhero comedy feels like something that could have been an absolute gem with another round of edits. Great performances by Margot Robbie and Jurnee Smollett are pitted against Ewan McGregor absolutely devouring the scenery.

The movie was a ton of fun, but it struggled with a threadbare plot (and, of course, a release just weeks before the pandemic shutdown). 

Kick-Ass

First of all, let’s just say that without this, we don’t get Kingsman.

Kick-Ass is probably the most direct page-to-screen adaptation on this list, featuring costumes and story beats that feel like they were ripped right from the pages of a Mark Millar comic. And, of course, it gave us our first indication that Aaron Taylor-Johnson could actually play a superhero!

Watchmen

It’s imperfect, but this movie is the very definition of a big swing. Zack Snyder was coming off 300, and he did the seemingly impossible: he made Watchmen into a movie. 

The comic had long been considered “un-filmable,” with a much-loved screenplay by Batman writer Sam Hamm that went unproduced for years. Ultimately, the criticisms of Watchmen were often that Snyder was too much a slave to the source material. What that means for comic book fans is that you can see some of your favorite scenes brought to life. And of course, it had almost uniformly excellent performances and some typically “Snyder” bone-crunching action.

Deadpool 2

While Deadpool 2 didn’t become the kind of cultural phenomenon that the first one did, it was still a ton of fun.

Now, of course, we have a Deadpool 3 on the horizon, and the filmmakers have said they would love to do an R-rated X-Force movie at some point (although whether that could work out with Disney’s plans remains an open question).

Blade

It’s only kind of a superhero movie, but it remains a fan-favorite. 

Blade is the kind of movie that could only have happened in the exact time and place that it did, and while a lot of its appeal is timeless, it really is a time capsule back to the very beginning of the moment when comic book adaptations started to become more affordable to do in a way that made the fans feel like somebody involved had read a comic book once.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League

Zack Snyder’s Justice League may not be everyone’s favorite movie, but it remains a massive improvement over the theatrical cut of the movie, as well as a triumph for not only the artist whose vision the film brings to life, but the audience, who spoke it to life.

It’s also leaps and bounds better than Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, giving each character moments of triumph that speak to the audience on a visual and visceral level. It’s hard to imagine wanting to sit through a four-hou, R-rated Justice League movie, but there are a fair number of people who have done so several times.

Deadpool

This one’s kind of the archetype, right? It’s almost hard not to have it at #1.

Deadpool is a comic that, to most fans, could only be done properly if it had an R-rating and pitch-perfect casting. Thanks to the determination of Ryan Reynolds, and the patience that comes from absolutely no certainty that the movie would ever happen to begin with, both of those things came together in one of the most entertaining comic book movies ever made.

The Suicide Squad

James Gunn’s take on the Suicide Squad feels like it takes all the best parts of Deadpool and filters them through the earnest, character-driven filter that made Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies work.

The Suicide Squad takes the “anything can happen” madness of the comics and blends it with Gunn’s unique voice, creating a story that’s one of the most enjoyable — and most necessarily R-rated — movies on the list.

Logan

It’s difficult to imagine a world where this doesn’t take the #1 spot on the list. 

Logan is a brilliantly-executed film, featuring one of Jackman’s best performances in his whole career, not just his best Wolverine. It’s one of the best comic book movies ever made, and if not for its success, it’s unlikely we would have gotten movies like Joker, which didn’t at all look like a billion-dollar movie on paper.