Superheroes Save Hollywood! (Barely.)

The stellar performance of superhero movies again this summer is enough to make you wonder if the film industry has figured out a way to bottle zeitgeist.

You need look no further than the summer's two tallest action-figure tent poles, Warner Bros.'s The Dark Knight and Paramount's Iron Man, to have a clue that a superhero doesn't require actual superpowers to tear up the box office. In fact, the films argue that a (very special) "everyman" story works with ... every man. And his date.

Paramount vice chairman Rob Moore finds that the very accessibility of the heroes is what cinched the deal this summer.

"Neither Batman nor Iron Man have special powers -- anyone can be that person," Moore says. "What resonates for people is there's someone out there who uses their resources to help their fellow man. At a time when the economy's not that great and we've got a war no one likes, it gives people a sense of hope."

Paramount got the best grade in John Horn's Los Angeles Times wrap-up of summer films. Both Horn and the New York Times docked Warners points for the expensive flop Speed Racer (and piled on the woeful Twentieth Century Fox, the summer's one loser among the major studios.)

Deborah Del Prete, who produced Frank Miller's The Spirit and hopes to see it succeed in lonely superhero splendor, well insulated from the summer action blockbusters, when it opens on Christmas Day, feels similarly.

"Our society is in a dark place, but these are heroes that save us," Del Prete says. "You may call Batman, Iron Man and the Spirit antiheroes, but at the end of the day they're protecting us at a time when there's a lot of fear.

"There's terrorism, there's a war on," she continues, "and when these comic book heroes began, and when The Spirit was written, there was a war on."

Her history is accurate. Superman creator Jerry Siegel (whose heirs recently won a case reestablishing their right to the comic. which he created in 1938) watched the character ascend in popularity -- and spread from comics to newspapers, and radio -- steadily until 1945.

His stable mate Batman and several prototype Marvel characters also emerged around then. As Gerard Jones wrote in his history of comic books, Men of Tomorrow: "No other fad in entertainment has ever paralleled real-life events as closely as the superheroes paralleled World War II."

(Tellingly, as the war's end approached in 1945, Jones notes that superheroes' sales began to drop. "By the end of 1946," he writes, "they were only two-thirds what they'd been at their peak. ... By the end of 1948, most superhero comics had been canceled or converted to other genres.")

A flash-forward to 1967 shows Steven J. Ross, as head of the Kinney Corporation (which later acquired Warner Bros.), snapping up DC Comics. That move alone may have eventually justified Ross' infamously generous pay packets as Warner evolved into a global media conglomerate.

If the growth of comic books into the film industry's surest thing began 70 years ago and the wave of studio licensing of such properties began 40 years ago, this summer seems to have capped the trend.

The domestic box-office revenue for the studios in the crucial run from the first weekend in May through Labor Day is estimated at $4.2 billion. That's about 0.5 percent more than 2007's $4.18 billion -- but thanks, it's regrettable to note, to a 5 percent rise in ticket prices.

(Batman added another boost, of course; The Dark Knight recently crossed the $504 million line and is settled in comfortably behind Titanic as the biggest-grossing movie of all time.)

Buried in the revenue surge was the slim but possibly nervous-making estimate that the actual number of people who went to cinemas to see movies fell between 4 percent and 6 percent. (Admissions estimates range from a total of 577.1 million to 586.6 million.)

With a nod to the frothier fare that did well -- Warner Bros.'s Sex In the City with its surprising $152 million haul; the same studio's Get Smart, which showed Steve Carell's ascension as the town's major comic-on-film; and the mind-blowing $232 million worldwide that Mamma Mia spun out of its hellzapoppin' freneticism -- this was a summer of action-hero fare.

That means not just the Batman, and not just the Iron Man with his $317 million in the U.S. (and $250 million more overseas), but also Marvel and Universal's better-than-expected The Incredible Hulk and Wanted.

And more is to come, including next year's Watchman, a movie that is promising enough to set two major studios at each other's throats over distribution rights.

Such success for what were frankly designed as crowd pleasers could invoke a "well, duh!" moment. As Universal marketing executive Adam Fogelson hinted to me on the eve of Wanted's release, who wouldn't want to see Angelina hanging backwards over the hood of a Cobra at speed pumping out shotgun rounds?

But just as that film pulled star-in-the-making James McAvoy into a vortex of --well, who could summarize the graphic violence that went on in Wanted's third act? -- The Dark Knight was sufficiently brutal in its ethos to cause a few (quickly dashed) predictions of disappointing numbers.

And Iron Man was at its heart not just a Robert Downey Jr. romp through superherodom but a burnt-along-the-edges tale of a rich roué whose heroism, as the New York Times' A.O. Scott said, "is all handicraft, elbow grease and applied intelligence. "

Though Del Prete gives much of the credit to the current troubled zeitgeist, she says that ultimately filmmakers like The Dark Knight's Christopher Nolan, Iron Man's Jon Favreau, and The Spirit's Miller "are not taking any surveys."

"They have their own dark vision that happens to be working," Del Prete says. "As [Spirit creator Wil Eisner] put in a panel many years ago, 'This is not a little boy's comic book.' "