That’s a shame, because Dredd is one of the most underrated R-Rated superhero movies of the past decade. Yet, Dredd landed with little impact, and the prospects of sequels were scrapped. Dredd wasn’t an entirely risky prospect, as reception to early screenings at Comic-Con and the Toronto International Film Festival were largely positive, and the $45 million budget posed less of a risk than the $200 million plus spent on The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Dark Knight Rises. The new spin on the masked judge, jury, and executioner created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra was the first to adapt the character since the ill-fated 1995 Judge Dredd film starring Sylvester Stallone. The genre was thriving, but a new Dreddfilm managed to slip by largely unnoticed when it debuted in September.

Even if critical reception for The Amazing Spider-Man earned a collective shrug, it still collected nearly $800 million worldwide, and a smaller gem like Chronicle indicated that with a good story and a creative filmmaker behind it, superhero movies didn’t need huge budgets.

It represented a major shift in how Marvel and DC handled their core properties the MCU explored the crossover capabilities of their interconnected universe with The Avengers, and Christopher Nolan closed out his Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises a year before the DCEU launched. 2012 was a landmark year in the history of superhero movies.

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