10 Reasons The Marvel Cinematic Universe Is Doomed To Fail

2. Each Character Can Only Have So Many Arcs

The reason that so many sequels tend not to live up to the originals purely comes down to the fact that you're dealing with a character who changed - arced, if you will - over the course of the last flick. To ask that character to arc all over again is a huge deal, because people don't change that often in real life. It can work, of course, and has done; Indiana Jones arcs a number of times in that famous series, but he has valid prompts to do so - in Temple of Doom, for example, he grows a moral conscious; in Last Crusade, he rekindles with his lost father. Still, asking a character to change twice isn't the same as asking them to change six times (the length of Chris Evan's contract, to cite an example). Characters who don't change become boring, of course, because - as with anyone in life - they become familiar and therefore less interesting. Movies hinge on the idea that characters change, because that inherently draws us in as people. Tony Stark the a*shole to Tony Stark that little bit less of an a*shole over the course of the first Iron Man gave us something to root for; sequels often take their characters to places that don't feel logical because they have no choice but to try; this is an issue that will doom the MCU.