10 Annoying Things Every Superhero Movie Does

6. Dead Parents

As seen in: Batman Begins, Spider-Man, Superman

Although this is very much an issue inherent to the source material, writers mining the fact that barely any superheroes have parents for dramatic tension has made every character's origin feel a little samey.

Every one of these protagonists has mommy or daddy issues in some form, with the most extreme of course being Bruce Wayne, but dead parents have haunted everyone from Spider-Man to Superman. That's not inherently a bad thing, of course, as there's so many great emotional beats directors have wrung from this material, but it is starting to feel stale.

The idea of stripping superheroes of parents to give writers and characters more freedom and not marry them to boring real-world issues might have been liberating back in the day, but now it's been covered so thoroughly that it might actually be more interesting to see how a hero would cope in that context.