10 Things Everyone Hates About Modern Movies

You'll often hear people complain about the lack of stakes in the MCU, and while Avengers: Endgame at least attempted to lend some true finality with the seemingly definitive deaths of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), it's true that death rarely feels concrete in the series.

And it's also true of most fantastical movie franchises. Star Wars, for instance, is obsessed with the idea that "no one's ever really gone," and as a result a character's demise tends to feel quite muted and underwhelming (see: the legacy characters dying off in the sequel trilogy).

Then there are more "grounded" movies like the Fast and the Furious franchise, which has brought numerous characters back from the grave in highly improbable fashion, in turn making it practically impossible to feel even the faintest sense of peril during all those high-wire action sequences.

Another issue is that so many blockbusters tend to go so big that it actively undermines their own sense of stakes.

Once you've seen a dozen planet-threatening beams get taken out by the heroes, it's hard to get continually invested in similar threats, especially when quips are often aggressively spliced into the action to ensure audiences don't ever get too anxious or uncomfortable.

Sometimes less is more. Captain America: Civil War felt practically subversive with its final battle simply being three men fighting at an abandoned facility with no real wider, Earth-imperiling stakes - but deeply personal ones.

The push for huge-scale spectacle is understandable when studios are chasing a billion-dollar box office, but there comes a time when that bigness is simply exhausting, and risks leaving audiences failing to connect with the IP emotionally which may in turn hurt future grosses.