8 Annoying Comic Book Movie Trends That Must Die In 2017

Popular trends eventually lose their novelty when they're overdone: once seen as innovative and interesting, they can become insufferable, boring, and lazy.

Here's where comic book movies come in, because comic book movies have a tendency to overuse trends until you're praying for them to die a horrible death. It's no wonder that people have complained about "superhero movie fatigue" when they're coming up against the same tropes, cliches, and plot devices on a regular basis. It's like eating the same meal, day in, day out, forever.

There's a reason for all this of course: trends indicate that something is popular, so filmmakers simply set out to give audiences what they want. This only backfires in the long run, though, when audiences realise they've actually been watching the same thing, repeatedly, with some slightly different packaging.

Some comic book movie trends have reached a point now where it is plainly time for them to disappear off the face of the Earth. They've been mined to such an extent that they've gone from fun to infuriating in the space of just a few years.

Hey, Hollywood: let's burn all of these trends with fires. Immediately.

It seemed inevitable that, once the well of interesting villains dried up, the studios would turn to story arcs involving the heroes, you know, beating up on one another. At first, this seemed like a dream come true - who didn't want to see Captain America going at it with Iron Man? Batman scrambling to find a way to defeat that immortal jerk going by the name of Superman?

In the comics, superheroes have been smashing each other to pieces since the very beginning, but it took a bit longer for this to occur on the big screen. And yet this once exciting prospect already feels like a bit of a dead end, especially when there are so few consequences to these hero showdowns.

For the studios, the whole "hero vs. hero" thing is ideal; it means they don't have to waste time introducing a new villain with a new reason to take over the world. For audiences, though, the whole idea has started to feel a lot like treading water. We know, after all, these guys are going to eventually kiss and make up, so these kind of inter-superhero battles begin to lose their sense of fun.

It's time to steer the films away from hero vs. hero plots and towards something else. Let go of this trend, Hollywood, before it starts to feel like a marketing ploy.