The superhero genre is now a billion-dollar monoculture: sleek, hypermanaged, and algorithmically calculated to maximize audience retention across demographics and continents. But just beneath that polished surface lies a grimy, glittering underworld of misfires—movies that tried to fly and crash-landed into something weirder and far more interesting. These are the films that never stood a chance against Marvel’s airtight synergy or DC’s tortured self-mythologizing. They are passion projects, studio embarrassments, and what-the-hell oddities that—despite financial failure—found redemption in the chaotic democracy of cult fandom.