10 Iconic Movies That Spawned A Thousand Imitators
5. Iron Man
Iron Man was a huge gamble at the time, with unproven new kid on the block Marvel Studios looking to upset the established order by self-financing and creating their own movies without even having access to many of their marquee characters, while also taking the unprecedented step of tying them all together into one overarching narrative that wouldn't be paid off for years.
As soon as their rival studios caught wind of the unprecedented success of the MCU's groundbreaking strategy that culminated in the $1.5bn success of The Avengers in 2012, the rest of Hollywood starting throwing entire cinematic universes at the screen as fast as they could in a desperate effort to experience similar rewards.
The reason why the overwhelming majority of these experiments failed is because too much time was spent on hammering home the point that more was to come, instead of focusing on making the best movie possible so that people would actually want to see more.
The Mummy, King Arthur and the Legend of the Sword and The Amazing Spider-Man movies simply told us a cinematic universe was on the way and expected us to be on board, while the proposed Lego-verse fizzled out in the wake of diminished box office returns.
After a rocky start, the DCEU is now established as a viable alternative, with Legendary's MonsterVerse also doing not too bad, but it isn't enough to announce that you're in the cinematic universe game and just expect people to buy in. Hell, Quentin Tarantino built one without anybody even noticing.