Superheroes saving lives on the silver screen can be traced back over 80 years — and much further than that depending on which cinephile you ask — with the first comic book movie adaptation Adventures of Captain Marvel coming out in 1941. However, it’s only in recent decades that the genre has soared in popularity, tightening its grip on Hollywood thanks to multiverses and movie slates of madness, with almost-monthly releases in some years.
According to box office data tracking site The Numbers, superhero movies became the first category ever to outweigh “contemporary fiction” (a catch-all bucket that picks up movies that don’t fit into other genres). Contemporary fiction accounted for 62% of US ticket sales at its 1997peak, but it lost the top spot for the first time in 2021 after superheroes took a whopping 31%share of the moviegoer market, thanks in part to smash hits like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Black Widow.
To put that into perspective, the genre barely registered 20 years earlier, when it captured just 0.1% market share in 2001. Indeed, superhero movies didn't make up more than 10% of American box office receipts until 2008 — a year often pointed to as the start of the modern era of super movies.
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