Superhero movies have been a staple of modern media for decades, always being massive hits at the box office. But two specific industries always dominate the genre: Marvel and DC. The most famous heroes, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Iron Man, The Hulk, and Captain America, all come from these two franchises. But, which one is better? I can personally say that Marvel is beyond a doubt better than DC. 

For one, Marvel has more interesting characters within its myriad of universes. For example, Iron Man — aka Tony Stark — started out as a “genius, billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist.” By the end of Avengers: Endgame,  he’s a selfless superhero who sacrificed his own life for the good of the universe. Batman fans are not able to witness the growth of a dynamic character since Batman films are frequently rebooted and do not advance the plot outside the original story line. Peter Parker stars in SpiderMan: Homecoming as a childish and rash teenager who has no clue what he’s doing. But by the end of SpiderMan: No Way Home, he’s evolved into a smarter and more mature person and hero, showing he’s growing and learning from his experiences. Once again, Superman fans are unable to observe the evolution of the character on screen. But that’s just Marvel’s cinematic universes, which doesn’t even begin to cover the rabbit hole that is the multiverse.

As aforementioned, both Marvel and DC have multiple universes — mainly comics and movies. Though there are many different movie and comic universes. For example, there are more than five different SpiderMan universes alone, never mind how many there are for each different character. And in the show What If?, a show that covers many of the different alternate universes,  they show there’s a seemingly infinite amount of universes, though it only focuses on a few. The comics are a whole different situation, with hundreds of universes. DC has its own multiverse as well with the number of reboots it does. But the difference is how they use them. As of now, Marvel’s cinematic universe (MCU) is focusing on the multiverse and just how big it is. But DC never tackles that, which is a waste of potential. 

As we’ve all heard at this point, Dr. Strange And The Multiverse of Madness was quite the letdown and really disappointed a lot of viewers. But this is an isolated incident. Marvel consistently gets high scores, with “The average Audience Score for every MCU film and show [being] 81.88%, while the average Tomatometer score is 81.84%,” says the article 13 AMAZING TOMATOMETER STATS FOR THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE by Rotten Tomatoes. According to the same website, “The Tomatometer Average for the 35 Theatrically Released Films Featuring DC characters is … a Rotten 56%.” That’s a 25.88% difference, and the stats don’t lie.

Marvel, in general, is just the superior franchise. It has so much more going for it right now that DC could never hope of catching up unless it managed to release a bunch of movies on par with or better than The Joker or The Suicide Squad. That’s not to say it’s bad, I love DC and most of its heroes are amazing. I especially like the fact it takes a darker approach to superheroes. But as of right now, Marvel just takes the cake for the best superhero franchise of them all.