10 Great Movies That Accidentally Made Cinema Worse
9. The Avengers Made Cinematic Universes The Next Big Thing
There's no denying the impressiveness of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a blockbuster franchise achievement, building a massive world of meaningfully interconnected films.
It all began with 2008's Iron Man, but the first MCU film to truly prove how satisfying a shared universe can be was 2012's The Avengers, which brought the prior solo movies together into a fantastically epic superhero team-up.
Its massive box office success, and the MCU's continued dominance, has caused every major movie studio to chase its coattails ever since, attempting to spin off every property they own into its own lucrative cinematic universe.
We've now got dubious movie worlds like The Conjuring Universe, the DC Extended Universe, and the Transformers Universe, and then outright duds that never got off the ground like Universal's Dark Universe and Guy Ritchie's King Arthur Universe.
As such it's no longer good enough to just make a good movie and leave well alone - every big-budget film needs a sequel-baiting post-credits scene and has to shove jarring A-lister cameos into the mix with the promise of meeting them properly next time.
Yet few cinematic universes have been constructed with the absolute care that the MCU has, meticulously honed by producer Kevin Feige such that it took 13 years for the franchise to release its first critically Rotten film, Eternals.
Sometimes people just want to watch a standalone movie that isn't bending over backwards to set up future attractions, but studios are so concerned with opening up additional revenue streams that it just isn't appealing to them anymore.
The days of one-off blockbusters like Inception are over for good, basically.