In the 2010s, superheroes were so popular that more or less every superhero movie — even if they were about little-known characters like Captain Marvel or the Guardians of the Galaxy — was guaranteed to be a hit at the box office. Fast forward to 2026, and even a premiere movie like Supergirl can’t break even. The age of the superhero movie, it seems, has ended.
But we’ll always have the memories. While DC and Marvel movies tend to grab all the headlines, there are quite a few superhero films outside that bubble available to watch on Netflix, including the surprise 2020 smash The Old Guard.
The Old Guard hits hard
Especially when Charlize Theron is the one swinging the axe
The Old Guard is about a group of immortal warriors who go around the world doing good. They’re led by Andromache of Scythia, who goes by Andy (Theron). Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) both fought in the Crusades, while Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), the youngest of the group, has only been around for a couple of hundred years.
All of these characters began their lives as normal human beings, but at some point, they discovered they had remarkable healing powers that effectively made them immortal. None of them knows why this happened, which is refreshing. It means there’s no need for the movie to tell us their “origin story,” since it’s as much a mystery to them as it is to us.
Instead, The Old Guard drops us right into the action. A U.S. Marine named Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne) dies while on duty, only to wake up unscathed. She is the newest immortal on the block and our audience surrogate. From there, The Old Guard launches into a plot about a shady pharmaceutical executive (Harry Melling) who wants to capture the immortal crew and study them in an attempt to crack the secret of immortality. We also learn about a former member of the group named Quỳnh (Van Veronica Ngo), who was condemned for witchcraft centuries ago and who has been spending the past several hundred years drowning in a loop, trapped in an iron maiden at the bottom of the ocean, which underlines one of the big potential downsides of eternal life.
The Old Guard is a superhero movie with a twist
And a heart
The characters in The Old Guard aren’t superheroes in the traditional sense. They don’t have powers like super-strength or invisibility; they’ve simply been around a very, very long time, and have therefore become extremely good at kicking butt.
To that end, the movie serves up several balletic action scenes that are sure to get the blood pumping. Charlize Theron, who proved her action bona fides in the 2015 classic Mad Max: Fury Road, is the highlight; she slices and dices with a conviction that makes you believe Andy really has been perfecting her craft for thousands of years. Unfortunately for her enemies, her craft is warfare.
But Andy and the other members of the Old Guard don’t hurt people for the fun of it; for millennia, they’ve earnestly tried to make the world a better place by fighting for noble causes. As the movie opens, they’re trying to rescue a group of kidnapped girls in South Sudan. It’s even implied that their altruism is part of the reason why they’re granted their powers, although those powers can fail at any moment.
In other words, the characters in The Old Guard are proper heroes, which makes it easy to root for them. And the movie is different enough from the over-produced fare from Marvel and DC that it doesn’t feel repetitive.
The Old Guard 2 was a major letdown
And also a bit of a metaphor
In 2025, Netflix debuted The Old Guard 2, and while it was a ratings success out of the gate, fans and critics alike widely rejected it; it has a 27% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes, compared to the 80% fresh rating for the first film, and audience scores roughly track with that drop. The second movie focuses too much on lore, and the action scenes are lacking. The Old Guard 2 ends on a cliffhanger, but with a reception like this, it’s unclear if a third film will ever get made.
It’s easy to look at these movies as a metaphor for the superhero phenomenon overall. The first came out in 2020, when interest in superhero movies was just starting to wane, and impressed people with its innovative approach to the genre. Too many years later, Netflix phoned in a sequel that assumed fans would be interested in seeing more, only to discover that they had moved on.
Superheroes soldier on
This isn’t to say that superheroes are over; there’s still plenty of superhero media getting made, on the big screen and the small. But new movies and TV shows have to bring something unique to the table, or be made with such a high degree of care that people have no choice but to watch them. The days when a superhero movie would succeed simply because it’s part of a wider franchise are over. But movies like The Old Guard help us remember what that heady time was like.
- Release Date
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July 2, 2025
- Runtime
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107 minutes
- Director
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Victoria Mahoney
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Charlize Theron
Andromache of Scythia / Andy
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Matthias Schoenaerts
Sebastien Le Livre / Booker
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Marwan Kenzari
Yusuf Al-Kaysani / Joe
