“Tell me, do you bleed?” Ben Affleck’s Batman asked Henry Cavill’s Superman in Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman. And in James Gunn’s 2025 Superman, the answer comes straight away. David Corenswet’s Man of Steel is lying in the snow, blood dripping after a fight with The Hammer of Boravia. A little shocking for those used to clean superhero battles, but not enough for horror legend Stephen King, who wants to see more blood in comic book movies.
The Shining writer recently told The Times, “If you look at these superhero movies, you’ll see some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks, but you never see any blood. And man, that’s wrong.” King isn’t subtle. He wants the kind of mayhem in superhero films to actually look painful.
But it’s not like the cinematic world has been shy about R-rated comic book violence. Just look at Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool or Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine movies. Also, Blade sliced up plenty of violence in the ’90s. And yet, when it comes to big-budget superhero movies, both Marvel and DC have largely sanitized carnage. Buildings explode, cars crash, civilians scream, but limbs stay firmly attached. Even DC’s occasional grittiness rarely crosses the line. We don’t see bones breaking. We don’t see blood.
Comic books themselves, however, are pretty much the same. Most aren’t soaked in gore. You’ve got exceptions like Lobo, sure, but mainstream superheroes don’t usually kill for no reason. Maybe that’s why King’s complaint lands as both serious and amusing. A horror writer calling superhero films tame feels like a guest bringing a flamethrower to a wedding. It might not be fun for everyone attending.
Of course, King joins a growing list of critics who’ve cast judgment on comic book adaptations. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, James Cameron, and Ridley Scott all had something negative to say about the genre. And even now, with superhero fatigue slowly creeping in, 2025’s entries have still made nearly $2 billion at the box office. That’s plenty of proof that despite critics, people will still pay good money to watch flying capes destroy cities.
King’s take is blunt. “I said, if you’re not going to show it, don’t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie,” he told The Times. But even R-rated films like the Deadpool trilogy and the two Joaquin Phoenix Joker movies are probably restrained compared to what King seems to imagine for the genre. He wants what comic books only occasionally promise: blood, guts, and consequences that feel real.
Of course, audiences aren’t lining up for Superman to decapitate villains (remember what happened the last time he broke a guy’s neck?). That’s not the point of mainstream hero movies. If you want gruesome, Brightburn did it.
But he’s not completely wrong. There seems to be a gap between comic book carnage on the page and the PG-13 restraint on the screen. And if anyone’s going to complain about that gap, it makes sense it would be Mr Blood and Guts himself, Stephen King.
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