The superhero blockbuster formula, and why it's tiring

I watched two superhero films a fortnight apart, released five years apart, made by two different studios. Forty minutes into the second, I knew exactly which scene was coming. Not because I’m clever: because the scene lands in the same place in both films. The hero doubts, a secondary mentor says a line, the music swells, and we’re off into act three.

A structure you can buy in a bookshop

The skeleton is no mystery. You can buy it. Screenwriting manuals cut a feature film into sequences timed to the minute, with an inciting incident around the twelfth minute, the hero’s collapse at the three-quarter mark, and a resolution that closes the promise of the opening image. The most famous of these manuals sells its battle plan like a baking recipe, and the industry adopted it enthusiastically, because it turns an artistic gamble into a budget estimate.

Behind it lies an older frame, the hero’s journey compiled by Campbell from myths. It’s nothing shameful in itself. What has changed is that it now serves less to tell a story than to secure one. A financier reading a compliant script knows where attention peaks will fall, so where to place the trailer, so how many screens to book.

What the calendar does to the story

A studio that announces its release dates five years ahead is really announcing its cash needs. The film is no longer a work that finds its date, it’s a date that has to find its film. I’ve seen enough software projects with a deadline set before the specification to recognise the smell.

It produces precise symptoms. Third acts rewritten during shooting. Characters introduced because they carry a future series on a streaming platform, not because the story needs them. Post-credit scenes that exist only to sell the next ticket, a neat way of charging twice for the same evening.

Fatigue isn’t the audience being capricious

When takings dip, the official line talks about audience fatigue, like a weather system. That’s convenient: weather is nobody’s fault. But audiences haven’t stopped loving stories about people in costumes hitting other people in costumes. They’ve stopped paying fifteen euros for the nineteenth variant of an object whose blueprint they already know.

What has worn out isn’t the genre, it’s the room for risk. The superhero films that still work are the ones that accept a strange tone, a broken rhythm, an ending that doesn’t tie everything up. In other words, the ones where someone managed to get an artistic decision past a committee.

What I watch for now

I’m not playing the purist: I still have a pile of these films in my history, and I’ll watch more. But I look at them differently. I spot the scenes that only protect the investment, and the ones where someone fought to keep a shot that’s pointless, too long, slightly ugly. Those seconds are rare, and they show.

A film calibrated to the beat almost never fails. That’s exactly the problem: nothing that can’t fail can really surprise you.