4. Iron Man
Marvel StudiosThere was a time when super hero movies were their own prospects. You would go see the movie about whichever superhero, appreciate it for what it was, and if you liked enough, hope for a sequel down the line. Then something happened, and that something was called Iron Man. While inarguably an incredibly shrewd business decision, Marvel's consolidation of their filmic property has led to a homogenization of the super hero genre. No longer are films based on Marvel's characters actual solitary stories with their own drawbacks and merits, but rather they have become cogs in a wheel of a perpetual motion machine where the main payoff is the tease about the main payoff that's eventually going to happen. And if any director be stupid enough to want to infuse these movies with some personal perspective or style, banish them from moviedom, as Jon Favreau and Edgar Wright found out. Now Marvel's abhorrent creative totalitarianism is defended in some quarters as "world building", a term meant to describe the benefits of the synergies created by the combination of multiple superhero's narratives. However, if the world built is nothing but an empty, hollow shell, what good is it? Perhaps if all you truly desire is the literal third-dimensional incarnation of the characters you've only previous seen on the printed page, then Marvel's cinematic take will suit you, but for those who find cinema exciting for its freedoms and possibilities, the success of Marvel's plans for world domination have been dispiriting.