10. Reboots Devalue The Genre
Sony Pictures ReleasingReboots are becoming increasingly popular in the world of cinema, where if something doesn't quite work out, film studios can just press the reset button and restart a property with a new cast and crew a few years later. While this is acceptable with a project that tapered off in quality and simply died, like Joel Schumacher's Batman movies, it begins to feel a little tacky when, within 5 years of Sam Raimi's mostly-solid Spider-Man series ending, the franchise was restarted. More to the point, director Webb opted to re-tell Peter Parker's origin story once again, and it just felt like a total waste of time. Similarly, the recent X-Men: Days of Future Past rejigged plot elements from Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand that director Bryan Singer didn't like, and while this movie used time travel in a relatively ingenious way to course-correct the series, it still devalues the very process of making a major Hollywood movie. This sort of culture now says to studios that it's not so bad if they screw up, and as such they're less likely to be careful in the future: after all, if a movie flops, they can just try again in a few years with different people. It sets an awkward precedent and makes the movies feel more throwaway: if studios can so easily disregard what came before, whether it's good or bad, how can we get emotionally invested in what's going on? Perhaps the healthiest attitude is to just treat these comic book movie worlds as people do the comics themselves: they're just different interpretations of a similar idea, and no one concept is "canon".