10 Times That Hollywood Misunderstood The Impact Of Big-Budget Movies
9. Being Self-Referential Or Meta Gets Old Really Quickly
To be fair, this has yet to hurt a movie’s overall quality or its commercial success, but some movies have felt the need to bring attention to their tropes in a tongue-in-cheek manner or using oft-outdated or out-of-place pop culture references to achieve a similar effect.
It can work if it is part of the character’s personality (such as Deadpool's awareness of the fourth wall) or if it is crucial to the story, but more often than not being meta or referencing an iconic movie moment from 30 years ago becomes increasingly distracting and feels like a crutch writers heavily rely on in place of realistic dialogue and humour.
It becomes even worse if most of the film’s characters are all meta-quip machines who cannot go one scene without a wry line or nod hinting at the film's improbable events (Age of Ultron is peak Whedon dialogue in all the worst ways possible).
All of this does nothing but make a picture's characters feel inexplicably similar in terms of their comedic sensibilties.