2. The "Nolan Style" Has Become Boring
Warner Bros.Christopher Nolan brought an entirely new cinematic style to both the comic book movie and the blockbuster in general with his Dark Knight trilogy: it stripped away most of the fantastical elements and focused on practical, formalist filmmaking that attempted to cement Gotham in the reality of our own world. Tonally, the focus was on dark, brooding psychological complexity, whereas aesthetically, the colour palette was a lot of blacks, greys and dark blues. Nolan's downcast style was an immediate hit with audiences, to the extent that other filmmakers began to adopt a similar style of filmmaking: in the comic book realm, Zack Snyder adopted a similarly dark style and tone for Man of Steel (on which Nolan was a producer), Iron Man 3 was sold on its "darker" narrative in trailers (even though it actually turned out to be pretty hilarious), and outside of comics, Sam Mendes took a similar approach with his superb Bond flick Skyfall. Though these movies did well by Nolan's popular aesthetic, it's also becoming pretty boring and predictable to just copy his style and apply it to other movies. As we mentioned earlier, the genre is inherently silly, so not everything has to be doom and gloom: look at The Avengers, the third highest-grossing film of all time and it has a considerably more upbeat tone than any of the aforementioned films.