Bryan Singer

To say superhero films are in a rut is to understate how bad a state they're in. Deadpool 3 was underwhelming, yet it was still the only superhero film released this year that wasn't terrible. Its competition? Venom 3, Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter and Joker: Folie à Deux.  2023 was a bit better, with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse both being genuinely great. But otherwise? Ant-Man 3 was unwatchable. The Flash was horrific. The Marvels was aneurysm-inducing. Shazam! 2 was utterly forgettable. I did actually forget that Blue Beetle existed until I started writing this list. Oh yeah, and there was another Aquaman movie. It, like most of the films listed here, flopped.

Cockburn can’t possibly imagine what attracted alleged pedophile Bryan Singer to Stephen King’s ‘Apt Pupil’, a story from King’s 1982 collection Summer of Corruption, which Singer first read aged 19 in 1984. Nor can Cockburn imagine why Singer was so obsessed by adapting King’s story that he commissioned a script on spec, and then, after the success of The Usual Suspects, turned down offers to direct The Truman Show and The Devil’s Own.  In Apt Pupil, set in the Eighties, Todd Bowden, a 16-year old a Californian high school student, realizes that Arthur Denker, the old man who lives down the street, is really Kurt Dussander, a fugitive Nazi war criminal.