6. There's Usually Too Much Going On
Sony Pictures ReleasingAs successful movies earn sequels, there's a constant pressure for a follow-up to be bigger and better than whatever came before it. As a result, this often ends up getting wildly out of hand, and the two test cases for this are, funnily enough, both disappointing Spider-Man sequels. After the enormous success of Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3 had Sam Raimi trying to juggle three villains, none of which he dealt with particularly effectively, resulting in a muddled, unsatisfying plot. Similarly, Marc Webb didn't learn from Raimi's mistakes: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 featured three villains (even if one of them was merely a cameo), and felt grossly over-stuffed, lacking a clear narrative direction. Even the better films of the genre suffer with this problem: Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight could have saved Two-Face for a whole other movie, and Rises was rife with plot holes and questionable logic which emerged because Nolan simply tried to inundate the audience with so much drama and information all at once. The recent X-Men: Days of Future Past is a decent example of a movie which just about got away with a potentially tricky premise, by nailing down some firm time travel logic and (mostly) sticking to it. Can we give it a rest with multiple, disconnected villains in a single movie? With the right actor and screenplay, one menacing primary villain is more than enough.