Movie lovers partial to year-end “prestige” movies like to think of the Oscar contenders now dominating movie screens as fundamentally different from summertime fare.

What, they may ask, could possibly connect a film such as The Iron Lady to a superhero movie like Captain America: The First Avenger?

The drama about Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, was being touted as an Academy Award contender months ago, sight unseen. That partly was because the film would be released during “Oscar season” (the first clue!) and partly because it is distributed by the Weinsteins, for whom winning Oscars is a specialty. But mostly it was considered a likely Oscar nominee because it stars Meryl Streep doing an accent.

That, pretty much, was all you needed to know.

Oh yes, and it is a biopic. The Academy loves film biographies, especially when they are about Brits or when the star has to transform him or herself.

But is The Iron Lady, which opens in Houston today, really all that different from summer popcorn like Captain America?

Both are origin stories. In the case of The Iron Lady, Margaret Roberts – a lowly grocer’s daughter – is transformed into Super Tory, indomitable savior (alongside a barely seen Ronald Reagan) of the free world.

Superhero movies, alas, tend to content themselves with telling how their heroes come to be. They save the rest for the sequels. Superhero movies, as a result, tend to feel rather thin. Many of them are all first act.

The Iron Lady feels thin, too, but for a different reason. The now of the movie has Thatcher in old age. Her mind is going. She spends her days in her home, talking to her dead husband (played mostly by Jim Broadbent). Other than that, she (and the movie) are awash in memories.

Thatcher led, of course, a very eventful life – there are lots of memories to exploit. But the movie feels thin because it really has nothing to say about any of it.

Like superhero movies, The Iron Lady feels as if it were hatched by committee, only in this case the committee wasn’t committed to making a brain-dead, souless summer blockbuster but a souless, conviction-free Oscar contender.

Yes, they speak with British accents and the stars are older and considerably less pretty than the stars of, say, Thor, or Captain America, but they’re all equally bent on dubious goals.