10 Times Hollywood Learned The Wrong Lesson From Movies

It's impossible to understate the enormous impact that the original Iron Man has had on cinema over the last 15 years. Without it laying the sturdy initial groundwork for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, 2012's epic crossover event The Avengers likely would've never happened.

And as novel as it was to see a slate of disparate superheroes eventually come together, the MCU's success told movie studios to try and force a Cinematic Universe out of every dusty property sitting on their shelves. Suddenly movies were being greenlit with the expectation that they'd lead to a bevy of sequels and spin-offs all under the same interconnected narrative umbrella, often before a single good movie had even been made.

While the DC Extended Universe famously struggled to replicate the MCU's success, surely the most egregious example of Hollywood trying to make universal fetch happen is the Dark Universe; Universal's planned shared cinematic world featuring its classic movie monsters, headlined by Tom Cruise's failed reboot of The Mummy.

Cinematic universes can be a great thing when they make sense, have had sufficiently planning and, most of all, the actual audience interest is there. But more often than not, these efforts have whiffed of producers chasing the MCU's coattails without putting in the required leg-work.