As some Dark Knight naysayers—notably New York magazine’s David Edelstein—observed at the time, superheroes are not, by their nature, obvious candidates for thoughtful drama. They tend to wear ridiculous costumes and wield implausible powers. But Nolan set a high bar for the newly somber enterprise, in part by wisely laying claim to the least outlandish of the breed: Batman possesses no superabilities and has frequently been portrayed as a fearsome vigilante, from Bob Kane’s original rendering, in 1939, to Frank Miller’s reimagining of the character in the 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, which served as an inspiration for Nolan.

Indeed, the bar set by the Dark Knight trilogy turned out to be so high that almost no subsequent films have managed to clear it. Warner Bros.—which produced Nolan’s films and has continued to deliver movies based on other DC-comic-book heroes (Superman, Wonder Woman, etc.)—spent years wearing the director’s grim legacy like a hair shirt. Following the final Dark Knight installment, in 2012, the studio turned its DC movies over to Zack Snyder, who shares Nolan’s affinity for darkness but little of his cinematic talent.

In Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel, Superman—customarily portrayed as something of a mega–Boy Scout—accidentally levels half the city of Metropolis and ultimately decides to kill his nemesis, General Zod. That is about the most un-Superman-like move imaginable. Even Nolan’s Batman didn’t intentionally kill anyone. Snyder followed up with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, a laughably bleak fable in which the two heroes decide to fight to the death for no plausible reason whatsoever—and then abruptly make peace when they discover that their mothers are both named Martha. And while Snyder did not direct Suicide Squad, the third entry in the DC Extended Universe, the movie (about a group of supervillains who are turned into a high-deniability hit squad by the U.S. government) followed his gloomy moral and aesthetic blueprint.

Happily, we appear to be in the midst of a new, and altogether different, shift in the genre—you might even call it a backlash—which may well provide a more sustainable model for superhero movies to come. As the saying goes: first time tragedy, second time farce. Experiments in supercomedy are taking place with increasing frequency, and meeting with considerable success. The various studios currently churning out stories of flying heroes and masked vigilantes are at different points in their evolution from drama to comedy. But in the steadily growing genre, they are all trending in that direction.

Last year, six of the 10 top-grossing films at the domestic box office were superhero movies, and the comic shift is proving contagious. This is in part because the ongoing boom has inspired studios to think big, moving beyond mere franchises in favor of vast cinematic “universes.” Heroes no longer just star in their own movies. They also cross-pollinate other heroes’ franchises and occasionally team up en masse for an extra-big blockbuster. In addition to Warner Bros., with its DC Comics cast of characters, two other studios have presided over their own superhero realms. 20th Century Fox owns the rights to the X-Men and related mutants from Marvel Comics, and has only just begun exploring the larger world-building possibilities this roster may enable. Marvel Studios, which covers almost all the rest of the Marvel characters—Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and so on—has proved the gold standard, with a total of 17 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies to its credit since 2008 and a combined box-office haul of $13 billion. (Assuming Disney—which owns Marvel Studios—completes its acquisition of Fox, their two superhero universes will be merged.)