10 Annoying Tropes Marvel Needs To Abandon To Save Phase 3

7. ...Then Go Horribly Wrong

The subtext of pretty much every Marvel sequel is that the centre simply cannot hold. The happiness and status quo the heroes has found must change. That's why Tony Stark finds out he's dying in Iron Man 2. It's why Thor loses his mother and brother in The Dark World. Oh, and it just so happens to also be why Captain America's belief in S.H.I.E.L.D. is left in tatters in The Winter Soldier when he discovers that HYDRA has infiltrated them. The heroes going on the run in Phase 2 was another trope, and you have to wonder whether this is deliberate or just that Marvel has got kind of lazy and stuck to the same formula for each of their movies. Of course, it works for them, and their movies are great otherwise, so perhaps they don't really need to worry about this too much. Even so, it certainly wouldn't hurt if they tried freshening things up in Phase 3 to avoid their releases all feeling the same. An argument could be made that the movies need this level of consistency, but there's a difference between that and repetitiveness. While it's interesting to see the heroes pushed to their limits as everything around them crumbles, that happening too often will rob their predicaments of any sort of impact. Moviegoers know the hero will triumph in the end, so Phase 3 shaking up how they approach problems could actually be really refreshing.