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The Dark Knight Rises is 2012′s Best Summer Movie

Cinema fansite Next Movie has released its annual audience poll, revealing that their readers responded overwhelmingly that The Dark Knight Rises was the summer’s best movie.

Christopher Nolan’s third and final Batman film took the title with over 60% of the vote, compared to just 20% for Marvel’s The Avengers, its closest competitor and the summer’s highest-grossing film by a wide margin. The same two competitors took the top spots in the Best Action Movie category, with The Dark Knight Rises taking 69% of the vote in that column compared to 25% for The Avengers.

Further down the ticket, The Dark Knight Rises star Tom Hardy, who played the film’s villain Bane, took the award for Standout Male Star in a landslide, accruing 75% of the vote to 9% for his closest competitor, The Amazing Spider-Man‘s Andrew Garfield. Spidey’s leading lady, meanwhile, fared somewhat better than her beau but still came in second to Catwoman, with Anne Hathaway scoring 65% of the vote to Emma Stone’s 13%.

It wasn’t all bad news for Marvel movies, though; Iron Man 3 edged out DC Entertainment/Warner Brothers’ Man of Steel in the Most Anticipated Summer Movie of 2013 category, although it did so after coming in a distant second to The Mortal Instruments. And no comic book movie appeared in the Biggest Disappointment category, which was a statistical dead heat between The Bourne Legacy and Dark Shadows with 23% each and Rock of Ages and Prometheus, which each garnered 22% of the vote. The remaining 10% of the vote went to Snow White and the Huntsman, although three of those films (Bourne, Prometheus and Huntsman) have sequels or spinoffs at various stages in development already.