IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE! IT’S NOT WHAT WE EXPECTED!

With a box-office take in North America worth more than $200 million, Justice League hardly seems like a failure – until you realize that its nine-figure income actually put it in sixth place among the superhero movies of 2017, behind Wonder Woman, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok and Logan.

In fact, the only superhero stories to fare worse at the box office were The Lego Batman Movie and the ill-advised Power Rangers reboot. Oh, and The Mummy, if that even counts.

So what went wrong with the Warner Bros. answer to Disney’s seemingly unstoppable Marvel Cinematic Universe? It’s actually quite simple: The studio tried to make a superhero movie. And audiences are over that.

The best so-called superhero movies of the past year were in fact not supehero movies at all. They set themselves up as a variety of alternate genres, and succeeded mightily.

Logan was the most obvious. It wasn’t just a western. It was Shane, the story of a reluctant gunslinger doing what he (still) does best. And to really drive the point home, there’s that scene where Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), an ailing Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and young mutant Laura (Dafne Keen) are cooling their heels in a hotel room with the 1953 western playing on the TV. She even repeats one of the film’s final lines at the end of the movie.

If you need more, consider the almost superfluous subplot in which Logan tries to help the owner of a small farm who’s being harassed by corporate types – that’s basically Shane in a nutshell.

No surprise, the movie is a favourite of Logan’s director, James Mangold, whose other credits include the excellent 2007 remake of another western, 3:10 to Yuma. He actually introduced a 2013 screening of Shane at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, noting that it transcended the western genre and speaking about “the lessons each genre can teach us about the others.”

Logan might be the most obvious example of the genrehopping superhero picture, but it’s hardly alone. The recent release Thor: Ragnarok plays out as a buddy-picture comedy, with Chris Hemsworth’s god of thunder and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk making a supremely odd couple working together to escape from the clutches of the Grandmaster, played by Jeff Goldblum. This meant the writers had to shovel in far more wit than either character had previously shown, but critics and audiences didn’t seem to notice, or mind.

Thor’s newest outing also contains a touch of the TV workplace sitcom in its DNA; the best shot in the trailer shows Thor meeting his mysterious opponent for the first time and crowing: “Yes! We know each other. He’s a friend from work.”

The workplace or family sitcom genre pretty much sums up all the Avengers movies, including this year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, which brought the newly adopted kid brother (Tom Holland as Spidey) fully into the fold.

And Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is another example of that style, with Chris Pratt’s character caught between his ersatz family of fellow galactic defenders, and his real father, played by Kurt Russell. He even has a third family in Yondu (Michael Rooker), although that relationship was half adoption, half abduction. (Abdoction?)

Now compare that with Justice League. On its face, the super sextet features a kind of family dynamic – mom and dad (Wonder Woman, Batman) and a series of siblings that would make Angelina Jolie proud. Barry Allen (Flash) is the young smart aleck, Victor Stone (Cyborg) the troubled teen and Arthur Curry (Aquaman) the eldest, dragged back home to help out. And Superman is – gramps? I don’t know. It is possible to overthink these things.

But their interactions don’t feel overly familial, or even collegial; more like a UN committee. They’re the Justice League, not the Super Friends. And while they do occasionally make funny (mostly the Flash’s job, although there’s also a nice bit involving Wonder Woman, Aquaman and the lasso of truth), the characters are more apt to wax nostalgic about “a time when the world still worked.” Or complain: “We tend to act like the Doomsday clock has a snooze button.” It’s gallows humour with extra gallows.

It’s hard to fully blame director Zack Snyder for this. His first foray into the superhero genre was the very adult Watchmen in 2009, which worked very well, and he also took some cues from Christopher Nolan’s brooding Dark Knight trilogy, which wrapped up the year before Snyder’s 2013 Superman reboot, Man of Steel. It can take time to turn the mood of a franchise around.

Marvel, in contrast, started on a light note with the motor-mouthed Robert Downey Jr. in 2008’s Iron Man. And while some of the Marvel movies since then have hewn close to the serious superhero-origin structure – notably the first Thor and Doctor Strange – most have tried to capture something of Iron Man’s insouciance (hello, Ant-Man) or gone for a broader, guys-on-a-mission vibe lifted from any number of Second World War movies.

Of course, DC/Warner’s biggest success to date, and the reigning champ of the 2017 crop of superhero movies, is Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot and directed by Patty Jenkins. And while it is a fairly standard superhero origin story – growing up, discovering one’s powers, testing them, feeling doubt, perseverance, plus a love interest on the side – it’s also just different enough to feel fresh.

Part of that is quite simply the feminist take on the genre; there’s been a pentup demand for a real female superhero in the movies. But Wonder Woman feels broader than the format. There’s a bit of romantic-comedy in its bones, a sliver of It Happened One Night witty repartee and sexual tension between Chris Pine’s worldly Steve Trevor and the innocent if formidable Diana.

That frisson was the mostmissed element in the grumpy group in Justice League. Whether it becomes a lesson learned or ignored is something only future superhero movies can tell us. Will Infinity War be a mockumentary? Can we expect a musicalcomedy called Ant-Man and the Wasp? Will Venom be a horror? Aquaman a neo-noir? Because with so many sequels coming down the pipe, the last thing viewers want is for all their superhero movies to be superhero movies.