10 Ways That The Marvel Cinematic Universe Has Ruined Cinema

6. Farewell, Sophisticated Storytelling

Writing a good script is something of an art form. Great screenwriters obsess over every scene, line of dialogue and narrative beat, tweaking structure and rewriting pages 'til they're blue in the face. Why? In order to tell a single, self-contained story with maximum efficiency, of course. That is the plight of the screenwriter, after all - to deliver a well-defined story in 100 or so pages. And it's something that many screenwriters, both new and old, continue to find themselves losing sleep over. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has sort of killed the need for efficient, sophisticated storytelling dead. After all, movies in this particular "canon" (and any Cinematic Universe, therefore) are written by people who know that their screenplay doesn't mark the beginning or the end of a story - it's just part of a larger whole. Which means that the writing doesn't have to be anywhere near as careful, coherent or streamlined as it would in a regular film. If something important gets missed out, it can just be expanded on or explained in a later chapter, can't it? Which, when you think about it, isn't a particularly great way to work. There's less pressure, sure, but when it comes to screenwriting, pressure can be a good thing. It forces you to think long and hard about your decisions when putting together a script; it forces you to think about the most economical way to tell a particular story. And as far as the MCU is concerned, that has been lost.