10 Movies To Blame For The Current State Of Movies

10. Everything Needs A Cinematic Universe - Iron Man

It's not an exaggeration to say that the cinematic landscape would be very different were if not for the success of 2008's Iron Man, which of course went on to establish the now-gargantuan Marvel Cinematic Universe.

At the time, an Iron Man movie was no guaranteed hit, yet its extraordinary popularity led to an industrious effort on the part of Marvel Studios to establish an interconnected cinematic empire capable of churning out multiple movies per year.

And to the MCU's credit, there's been an impressive critical and commercial consistency to the two-dozen movies released to date. But like anything successful, it soon enough emboldened others to try and imitate it.

And so, the last few years have seen movie studios en masse trying to cobble together their own cinematic universes, with typically mixed-to-disastrous results.

Most prominently, the DC Extended Universe suffered through some brutal growing pains and has now largely deferred to focusing on a series of standalone yet loosely connected superhero movies.

Elsewhere, J.K. Rowling is pressing ahead with a five-movie (!) Fantastic Beasts series in spite of an increasingly exasperated fanbase, there's a loosely-connected Conjuring Universe, a "MonsterVerse" featuring Godzilla and King Kong, and Transformers is currently trying to diversify itself into a wider universe.

Then there are the flat-out humiliating flops: Universal's infamously failed Dark Universe is an embarrassing testament to executive hubris, and Guy Ritchie initially planned to make his King Arthur: Legend of the Sword a launchpad for a six-movie universe before it bombed horribly.

Like anything movie studios do, it's a simple numbers game: original IP are risky and prone to failure, so of course every producer in Hollywood wants their own dependable franchise to effectively print money.

But earning the goodwill that makes the MCU near-bulletproof with audiences cannot be rushed, as most of the above examples have proven.

More or less, the MCU is the outlier, the one majorly successful cinematic universe to which all others have aspired, and typically failed.