12 Ways 2015 Movies Definitely Made You Dumber

7. Blockbusters Exhausted Everyone With Terrible Romantic & Family Subplots

You just know that in board rooms all over Hollywood there are panels of studio executives who read a script and then call up the writer to tell them that focus groups indicate audiences won't connect to a movie unless it has a love story and/or family for the hero has to defend. Quite what sewer-dwelling mutants these execs are surveying for their focus groups is anyone's guess, but in 2015, aren't we a little past such blatant audience pandering? This year saw a number of blockbusters pulling out the ham-fisted subplot card: Age of Ultron had a wildly unnecessary romance between The Hulk and Black Widow, Ant-Man saw Scott Lang defending a family we didn't really care about at all, and Jurassic World devoted a head-scratching amount of time to a divorce subplot that ultimately went nowhere and meant nothing, alongside a hilariously forced central love story. That's just a few examples, but they're all so aggressively bland and lazily written (likely because the writer themselves is adding them against their own will) that it's hard not to zone out and start drooling out of sheer mind-numbing boredom. These homogenised plots are worse for the films and for us: we ultimately just have to put up with it and expect these filler scenes because someone, somewhere apparently actually craves this lame drama alongside all the explosions. Credit to Furious 7, though: that's one movie about both family and romance that actually worked, for obvious (and tragic) reasons.