More often than not, though, the obligation to turn a profit and satisfy a cult and tee up multiple sequels and spinoffs turns the work of directing these things into a middle-management gig. Directors are accountable not only to studio heads and producers but to an audience that has spent years or decades thinking about how the pluperfect screen version of Captain America or Thor or Man-Thing would look and act and punch and emote. It’s moviemaking by committee with a really big committee, another byproduct of our culture’s weird need for entertainment that behaves as if it’s been reading our blogs instead of trying to surprise us.

I’m not naïve enough to suggest here that superhero movies would become some kind of hotbed of auteurist innovation if Hollywood stopped trying to please the comic-book cognoscenti. I’m old enough to remember the days when studios assumed that A) only kids liked comic books, and B) those kids were idiots, a mind-set that brought us movies like Joel Schumacher’s contemptible “Batman Forever” and “Batman and Robin," both of which looked like “Starlight Express” on crank.

But I’m also old enough to remember when Warner Brothers entrusted the 1989 “Batman” and its sequel to Tim Burton, and how bizarre that decision seemed at the time, and how Burton ended up making one deeply and fascinatingly Tim Burton-ish movie that happened to be about Batman (played by the equally unlikely Michael Keaton, still the only screen Bruce Wayne who seemed like a guy with a dark secret) and an even-more-Burtonian latex-fetish fever dream of a sequel that I’m not 100 percent sure Batman was even in.

And you don’t have to go that far back for examples of comic-book movies that exploded the genre — less than 10 years ago, we got a Freudian-monster-movie version of Hulk by Ang Lee and Bryan Singer’s “Superman Returns,” with a blatantly Christ-figureish Man of Steel. Each of those films is, shall we say, a problematic viewing experience, but they also represent honest attempts by their makers to impose a personal sensibility on superhero myths instead of just playing to an audience’s preconceptions. Lee and Singer had a take on their material; you could waterboard me and I still wouldn’t be able to tell you what Kenneth Branagh’s take on Thor was. And he’s Kenneth Branagh! You know a genre sandbox has become a prison when a guy who’s never been shy about punching up William Shakespeare’s work is afraid to leave fingerprints on Stan Lee’s.

As a fan of comics, I understand why fans want comic-book-movie directors to act like respectful stewards, but as a fan of movies, I want to see these movies directed by megalomaniac geniuses who’d rather fly to Cannes in coach than crowd-source one iota of their vision. Maybe then we’d get superhero movies that honor comics’ tradition of inventiveness, instead of D.O.A. brand-extensions like “Green Lantern,” a glorified video-game cut-scene of a movie in which Ryan Reynolds once again plays a jerk who learns to be less jerky.

I’m not suggesting that Marvel give “Thor 2” to somebody like Lars von Trier, much as I’d love to see what that guy would do with Norse mythology and a nine-figure budget. But since the whole reason Hollywood keeps making superhero movies is that they (theoretically) come presold to an audience that buys opening-weekend tickets no matter what, why not turn over these huge canvases to filmmakers who want to splatter them with similarly huge ideas?