10 Movies To Blame For The Current State Of Movies

6. Nothing Has Stakes, Everything Needs A Quip - The Avengers

The Avengers was as successful as it was primarily due to Joss Whedon's brilliantly witty script - and the top-drawer cast munching through it, of course.

Except, it also set a precedent in both the MCU and subsequent blockbuster filmmaking as a whole, that you can't keep the audience starved of a comedic one-liner for more than a few minutes.

One of the biggest knocks against the MCU since this movie - and as was especially prevalent in Avengers: Age of Ultron - is that potentially serious, dramatic moments are too often interrupted by forced comedy.

And when everything's a joke, nothing really has weight or gravity to it, compounding the stakes problem associated with a lot of fantastical, PG-13-rated blockbuster fare - the MCU in particular.

Combined with the backlash to the overly grim Zack Snyder DCEU movies, Hollywood has learned the wrong lesson, with the vast majority of tentpole movies now totally afraid of actually getting "real" without having a jokey gag ready to diffuse the tension.

Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy proved that broader audiences are game for serious movies, just not dour or self-consciously miserable ones like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Curiously, Avengers: Endgame felt like both a confirmation of this problem and a sure attempt to remedy it.

For while the film largely restores the MCU's status quo by resurrecting the "dusted" Avengers in crowd-pleasingly breezy fashion, at least Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) got a comedy-free demise.

But if you're disappointed in the lack of $200 million blockbusters which actually dare to take themselves seriously, you can blame the MCU for striking it rich on safe - if entertaining - thrills where the next joke is always around the corner.