Before every superhero movie needed to cost the GDP of a small nation, Chronicle came along and proved you could do something much meaner and much more interesting on a smaller scale. The 2012 found-footage thriller took a simple “what if teenagers got powers?” setup and pushed it somewhere darker, sadder, and a lot more chaotic than most comic-book movies were willing to go at the time. It’s still one of the sharpest genre swings of that era.