"In 1997, the superhero movie was all but dead. The last Superman flick had been released a decade earlier to disastrous reviews and ticket sales, the most recent Batman film was a franchise-killing bomb, and an oft-promised Spider-Man feature was grounded. Yet a mere five years later this once-derided genre would be well on its way to world domination at the box office and even critical respectability. How did this happen? And why, two decades later,...