The superhero is very much a modern American invention. As I was contemplating why superheroes worked so well in film, I stumbled across the idea of “superhero culture,” an illuminating essay written by Carolyn Brako who wrote, “America’s preoccupation with super heroes may be a key to understanding that fears and hopes of the most powerful country in the world.”

If you look at every successful American movie, the main character is always a superhero or anti-superhero—whom I’m defining as a character with superhuman power. Besides the obvious slew of superhero movies, seriously every successful movie involves a dominant character who has superpower or superhuman ability. In the Twilight series, it’s Edward the super vampire. In horror movies such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series, it’s always about the unkillable killers like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees.

And if you look at the all time box office hits in the United States, every movie involves a superhero, anti-superhero or characters that have superhuman power. You have the paralyzed Jake Sully who becomes a superhero in an alien culture in Avatar. You have Jack Dawson who is a super lover and improbably saves his girl in the historically tragic Titanic. You have Batman and the Joker in the Dark Knight, a dueling pair of superhero and anti-superhero. You have Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in Star Wars. You have Shrek in Shrek 2. You have the titular extraterrestrial in E.T. I can go on and on. You have Jack Sparrow dueling superhuman villains in the Pirates of the Caribbean series. You have Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story series. You have the transformers in Transformers. I can go on and on.

Modern Hollywood cinema is quintessentially about superpower, superheroes and anti-superheroes. Why? Because Hollywood cinema is the ultimate fantasy. It’s escapism. It’s pure entertainment. It appeals to our instant gratification of desire, whether it’s a desire to win a girl, to win a fortune, to win fame, to win a war, or all of the above within 2 hours of our lifetime.

So movies centering on ordinary people and those who exist outside of the superpower culture are naturally independent or international.

If you go back to the beginning of cinema, while the Lumiere brothers focused on documenting reality, Edison’s films (the precursor of American cinema) focused on presenting a super-reality to entertain the public. In Edwin Porter’s “the Great Train Robbery,” the first famous narrative film, the first anti-superhero was born. The unnamed bandit who fires at the audience at the end is probably our first image of a superhero in cinema. Even after all the bandits are shot, you have the super-bandit firing at you in close-up.

D.W. Griffith’s 1915 cinematic landmark Birth of a Nation was the first major movie that created the foundation for superhero cinema. In a total work of fiction, who do you think takes on the role of the superhero in Griffith’s film? A clansman of the Ku Klux Klan. Even president Woodrow Wilson was “supposedly” quoted saying, “[Birth of a Nation] is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

But Birth of a Nation is absolutely fictional like Hollywood cinema. So what makes it “true”? And why was it so successful? Well, it was because Birth of a Nation came at a time when America desperately needed mass relief to the popular fear of a changing nation—the fear of humanizing black Americans.

Well, no matter how supernatural or superhuman the superhero is… to make successful superhero cinema you have to manipulate plastic images to create the most truthful fictitious reality. The brilliance and success of Hollywood cinema is about making the impossible or improbable appear like reality and truth within the time frame of the movie. Pioneering everything from the Three Act Structure to visual effects, Hollywood cinema is the ultimate suspension of disbelief.

An antithesis to superhero cinema, Russian revolutionary cinema of the same era was developed in the exact opposite direction. The protagonist of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s landmark film Mother is a helpless proletariat Russian woman who brings potatoes to feed his son and support the revolution. Similarly, Sergei Eisenstein’s smash hits Battleship Potemkin and October are event driven epics about ordinary Russian people fighting for the revolution without a central protagonist. Absolutely not superhero cinema.

Back to Brako who intelligently warns us against our own superhero culture, she says, “Americans have forgotten that wars cannot be won overnight, and we get frustrated when we feel that nothing is being gained… The real battles are not the ones that can be fought in a day.”

But in Hollywood cinema, we win a war with Captain America or thwart global destruction with James Bond in a couple of hours.

Is Hollywood cinema truthful? No.

Can it be intelligent? Possibly.

Is it entertaining? Yes.

Is it satisfying? Yes.

So do you want to be a successful Hollywood filmmaker? Use the superhero cinema ingredients. They usually work in every genre.