10 Comic Book Movie Teases That Went Absolutely Nowhere
To be continued... Well, not really.
In the age of lucrative franchises, you'll rarely find a comic book movie that exists purely as a stand-alone entity. If there's not at least one sequel tease in there - or something that could be used to furnish a prequel or a spin-off at a push - studios simply aren't doing their jobs.
With shareholders breathing down everyone's necks and executive bonuses to be paid (even at the expense of the film's quality in some case), any sniff of multiple financial successes as a delicious captive audience must be catered to immediately. Unfortunately, when the first film ends up being a disaster, the confidence with which a sequel might have been seeded ends up looking a little bit silly.
There are also examples out there where firm plans end up being changed or dropped entirely between movies, so what we thought we were going to get never materialises. And in some of those cases, the set-ups included actually look pretty good...
10. Courting Death - The Avengers
The Set-Up
In Thanos' first appearance in the MCU - as part of the post-credits stinger on The Avengers - his underling The Other warns that challenging humanity would be akin to "courting death," to which the Mad Titan smiles knowingly. It all seemed to be heading towards the Infinity Saga, which would see him literally courting Death by wiping out half of existence with the Infinity Gauntlet.
But Then...
Despite Kevin Feige's claims that everything was planned precisely years in advance, the plans for Thanos clearly changed (after all the Infinity War writers wouldn't be hired for years) and the Death storyline was dropped entirely.
Instead, Thanos was made a more sympathetic type of villain who wanted to restore balance to the universe. Less cartoonish by some distance (and a lot better, in all honesty).