In the years since Superman and Batman first graced movie screens, the look and feel of superhero films has changed significantly.
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Is it for the better? Well, there’s a lot of debate on that point. Certainly older shows, whether it’s the ’60s Batman series, or 1970s screen appearances by Superman and Spider-Man, had verisimilitude on their side. By and large they looked just like the comics.
That said, the humans wearing the costumes didn’t always look totally superheroic, and as production values increased and the cost of making a superhero movie ballooned, a new aesthetic seemed to take over.
After Batman, and particularly around the time of Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie, it became clear that leather and other sturdy materials would stand in nicely for tights, and while Spider-Man didn’t embrace the leather look, it definitely felt closer to the Singer/Burton vision than the Donner one.
Since then, we’ve seen a number of recurring costume elements in superhero movies and TV shows: leather, rubber, minimizing the role of masks, eliminating the trunks from characters who previously had them.
With Spider-Man: Homecoming hitting theaters, we have our fourth major American live-action take on the character’s costume, and it felt like as good a time as any to look back a little bit at how superhero costumes have changed over the last few decades.
SUPERMAN
Here’s where the conversation gets immediately tricky: we aren’t going to use the first-ever big screen Superman (Kirk Alyn, who appeared as the character in a pair of serials starting in 1948), but his most widely-recognized version onscreen: Christopher Reeve’s 1978 feature film take.
It’s worth mentioning that before Reeve, but after Alyn, there had been George Reeves, who played the character from 1951 until his death in 1959.
The look of the costume had minor tweaks between 1948 and 1978, but was materially the same costume for all that time — so much so that small changes made to it for 2006’s Superman Returns frustrated some fans at the time.
The costume was…well, tights. Ripped right from the pages of the comics, Superman’s costume was a form-fitting unitard with “modesty briefs” where one’s underwear would go, as well as a red cape and boots. The S-insignia changed from time to time, as did the shades of “blue” and “red” (some of the black and white costumes actually used gray and brown or black), but for all intents and purposes it was the Superman costume from the comics, with minimal changes.
In the same way that George Reeves personified the Silver Age version of Superman — a barrel-chested basher with slick hair and a square jaw — the tall, slim, and muscular Reeve look would sync up with a Neal Adams reinvention of the Man of Steel, and help set the standard for the mid-’80s reboot by writer/artist John Byrne.
The Byrne reboot would set the tone for Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and help set the mythology for Smallville. Later, elements of those would be blended with Donner films in Superman Returns, yielding the last movie where a “traditional” Superman look would come to live action, although even by then the reds were getting browner, the material getting darker and more textured, and minor tweaks like the logo being a plastic relief sculpture on the Man of Steel’s chest were added.
By the time Henry Cavill got the gig for the DC Extended Universe, comic book movies were in full-on post-Dark Knight mania. Insanely elaborate superhero costumes with exotic textures were used for Batman Begins, Iron Man, and The Amazing Spider-Man before Man of Steel darkened Superman’s blues, replaced the yellow field behind the “S” with black (in many, but not all, shots), and did away with the trunks and belt.
THOR
Before he appeared in Thor, the God of Thunder made his first Marvel Comics-related appearance on film in The Incredible Hulk Returns, a TV movie in which he looked more or less like a fairly generic Viking.
In that movie, Thor was (like the Hulk himself) played by one actor while his alter ego, Donald Blake, was played by someone else.
The Kirby-inspired touches that define his comics (and Marvel Cinematic Universe) costume absent, Thor rocked a very natural look, complete with giant fur collar.
It kind of fit with the look and tone of the movie for which it was designed, in which Thor was less the noblest of warriors and more a kind of lightning-infused meathead…but it certainly doesn’t scream “Thor,” at least to those who recognize him primarily from the Marvel Universe.
In the intervening years, live-action Thor takes were limited to cosplay and maybe a Saturday Night Live sketch or two; when he arrived in the MCU in 2011, the look and feel of the universe was already pretty well-established, and Thor’s appearance drew from the existing aesthetic of the Iron Man and Hulk movies.
BATMAN
Batman is a tricky one because over the years, he’s had plenty of familiar iterations.
Probably the most cartoonish version of the Dark Knight appeared in serials in 1943, played by Lewis Wilson. In that take, the mask was almost cartoonish, mirroring the character’s comics headpiece at the time.
Probably his biggest splash in popular culture came from 1966’s Batman TV show, starring Adam West in the title role; there, they realized that basically anything you do with a cloth headpiece was going to look strange and probably silly, so rather than going for total loyalty to the comics, they crafted a hard plastic headpiece that would, in turn, inspire a “bright knight” era of the comics due to the show’s popularity.
In 1989’s record-breaking movie, Michael Keaton would play the role with a sculpted rubber/kevlar body, and an all black look that used the yellow oval that had been present in most takes on Batman for years at that point.
By 2005, the Batman Begins costume had a militarized, tactical approach to Batman, witha more “armored” look that eschewed the bright yellows of the ’66 and ’89 Batman suits in favor of something that actually looked like a less-campy version of the relief-heavy Joel Schumacher costumes.
When the character was reintroduced for the DCEU, Ben Affleck’s Batman was powerfully built, wore a costume that was borderline identical to the comics version of the costume (a la Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns) but giving tights the boot in favor of the same textured rubber that Man of Steel had carried over as the universe’s status quo.
CAPTAIN AMERICA
Captain America appeared in two 1979 live-action television movies that aired on CBS: Captain America, and Captain America II: Death Too Soon.
The TV movies took a lot of liberties with the comics, including changing the character’s origin story, his reasons for becoming Captain America, and the his look and style.
The notoriously-bad movies (and costumes) weren’t the first look at Cap, who had appeared in a 1944 movie serial, but they left a mark (not necessarily in a good way).
Ironically, while there were some variants on the costume in the TV movies and the serials, there were some pretty true-to-the-comics versions, too — arguably even moreso than the main costume from any of the MCU movies, in which Chris Evans takes a kind of “greatest hits” approach to Cap’s look.
Like Thor, the biggest defining characteristic of the Cap costume is that it looks like it’s part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, something that helped the first Avengers movie, generally understood to be a big financial risk, to be a little more visually cohesive.
In that film, though, there was a look that featured tights, buccaneer boots, and little wings on Cap’s head: his “stage musical” costume, worn during USO performances.
WONDER WOMAN
Like many of the characters on this list, Wonder Woman got an early adaptation that looked more true to the comics than its successors…although it may not have translated so well to the big-budget blockbusters of today.
In 1977, Wonder Woman hit the TV airwaves, and Lynda Carter wore a tights-and-tiara version of the comics universe costume.
That version came both after and then before a number of abortive efforts to bring the character to TV, many of which came complete with cheap knockoffs of the suit. When David E. Kelley almost made one about five years ago, it played off of the then-current version of the comics costume with long pants and a sleeveless/blackless top.
Then fast-forward to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, when the DCEU version of the character debuted and Gal Gadot blew the doors off the joint.
Her look, inspired by real-world gladiators and traditional mythology about both the Greek gods and goddesses, and Amazon warriors, was on-point, even if fans were a little sad to see both the brighter color scheme and the stars-and-stripes-inspired look of the past go by the wayside.
SPIDER-MAN
The Amazing Spider-Man, which debuted in 1977, was a strange and trippy superhero TV romp reminiscent of the Batman ’66 series, albeit with a bit of ’70s edge.
The show featured two variants on the Spidey costume: one that looked almost exactly like the comics costume, except for reflective eyes rather than the all-white ones seen in the books, and one that featured a belt and “bracelets” for web cartridges.
That latter costume is actually something that has inspired some looks over the years, from Dan Jurgens’s Clone Saga-inspired reinvention of the costume in Sensational Spider-Man to the costume in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Before Homecoming, of course, we saw Spidey in a pair of franchises, both of which had costumes that were generally popular, although one much more so than the other.
The first, Sam Raimi’s trilogy, similarly had eyes that didn’t look quite…right…but in all other ways hardcore fans thought the costume was perfect, a near-replica of the comics version except for the rubber “webbing” and spider logo, which were on the forefront of the “rubber everything” trend that has since overtaken many superhero movies.
In The Amazing Spider-Man, they tried to modernize the look slightly while retaining most of the Raimi aesthetic, and it got blowback: why bother to modernize the look, when the previous movies were so nearly perfect in their take?
Funny enough, the Homecoming costume, which has a classic Spidey face but in all other ways is more reminiscent of the Amazing costume than the Raimi suit, has drawn broad support from those same fans.
THE JOKER
Yeah, there were Batman movies early on, but it was decades before superheroes in other media got their own villains rather than poor substitutes, generic villains like gangsters or Nazis, or the like.
The Joker first made his live-action splash in the 1966 TV series, played by Caesar Romero, and one of the things that’s interesting about this character is that he’s one whose look has changed so often in the comics, that with rare exception it would be hard to find a look that hasn’t been used, more or less, in the source material.
Romero was a pretty pitch-perfect take on the comics, with pancake makeup, green hair, an omnipresent smile, and a purple suit.
All of that — minus Romero’s painted-over mustache and plus about twenty years of makeup and effects progression — was repeated in the darker, more sinister smiler of Jack Nicholson’s 1989 Joker. Both the character’s look and the approach to him carried more or less over whole cloth from the ’66 take, albeit with a darker backstory and a bit more of a global plan.
In 2008, The Dark Knight radically reinterpreted The Joker to be a bit more like the ultra-violent, unstable version popularized in the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths comics; his look was messy, the makeup looked half-assed, and whether it was actually a part of him or just makeup was never fully explained, and the purple suit was grimy and disheveled.
That version was so impressive that the studio seemed to have decided that rather than try and keep up with it, they had go to a wildly different way, so the urban gangsta approach, featuring an emaciated and tatooed Joker who dresses in high fashion and strongarms his goons, was the answer in Suicide Squad.
THE INCREDIBLE HULK
The first live-action appearance of The incredible Hulk was, more or less, what you would expect.
Lou Ferrigno (painted green) played the jade giant in a ’70s TV series that saw Bill Bixby play “David” Bruce Banner, the Hulk’s alter ego.
That show would create a number of made-for-TV spinoff movies, but by the time anybody used the Hulk again, it would be in Ang Lee’s notorious 2003 film Hulk, in which the first fully-CGI Hulk was created, emboldened by the success (?) of Jar-Jar Binks in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
In Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk, the character came back over to Marvel Studios but never broke completely with its first film’s backstory, creating a weird half-sequel/half-reboot that was slightly better, but nowhere near as interesting and daring, as Hulk.
The big breakthrough with The Hulk has come with performance capture, which has allowed the raging beast to be portrayed through Mark Ruffalo’s actual acting rather than a fully-CGI render that forces animators to make up the “acting.”
MORE DC & MARVEL NEWS
This week sees the release of Spider-Man: Homecoming, the first major partnership between Marvel and Sony following the introduction of Spidey to the MCU in Captain America: Civil War.
Also currently in theaters: Wonder Woman, which has passed $700 million globally and topped Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad as the biggest domestic hit in the DCEU; and Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2, one of the best-reviewed blockbusters of the year and a follow-up to James Gunn’s acclaimed surprise blockbuster.
More DC news:
- Wonder Woman Pushes the DCEU to $3 Billion Worldwide
- Costume Designer On What Wonder Woman Got Right About Armor
- More DC Comics Characters Identified In New DC Films Intro
- Spider-Man: Homecoming Stars Show Support For Wonder Woman
More Marvel news:
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