And if you want inter-dimensional battles with invading aliens, you'll have to rewatch Thor: The Dark World.

Marvel Studios
Or you could just take my word for it. No one would blame you.

And in Iron Man 3 ...

DC. Ha! No, It's Marvel and We All Know It.
... you get the idea.

Sooooooooo what's up with that, Marvel? You've been totally crushing it with the zingers and character development (two things that seem consistently impossible for most other big-budget movies) but how come, since The Avengers, you only know how to end movies with a big special-effects extravaganza? What happened to Charlie Chaplin duking it out with The Dude, like at the end of Iron Man? Hell, in Guardians it doesn't even really make sense: We've barely even seen Zandar (Xandar?), and have no real reason to care about it aside from our natural human tendency to prefer that innocent people don't die.

Unless ... that's the plan? OK, I have a weird theory, and I really hope that it's what they're doing: Most hardcore movie dorks know that The Avengers 2 is going to end on a downer, because it's the second part of a planned trilogy (see: The Two Towers, The Empire Strikes Back, or even The Hobbit: The Desolation of Snooze. Also, Joss Whedon has said this is happening). Hopefully, this'll be a real emotionally impactful moment, rather than a visually stunning one, and that'll set the trend for all of Marvel Phase 3: Just like how every movie after The Avengers has reused at least one aspect from that climax, each Phase 3 movie will end with stakes that are equally large but more personal, more subtle, more based on emotions than VFX.

But there's something else that needs to happen, and this is more of a stretch ...

But no matter how bad these movies get, Sony can't stop making them, or else Marvel will get the character back. This isn't technically a good strategy for Sony, since they can't make these movies good without Sam Raimi, but they can't give up because the rights to Spider-Man reverting to Marvel would end the shit out of someone's career. Can you imagine the guy who has to go up to Sony Pictures' CEO and take the blame for Spider-Man appearing in Avenger's 3, and Marvel now has all the money? Within minutes they'd be laying their head on the chopping block and some CEO would be all, "For the crimes of cutting our losses, I, Kevin, of House Sony, sentence you to die." In this instance, literally everyone in the world would be in a better situation (Sony would stop sinking money into movies they apparently can't make good without Sam Raimi around, and Marvel would regain control of their most popular character and do something fucking great with him). Well, everyone except that one dude who's head would roll down the grass and land at the feet of his sobbing children. Ya know what? I don't even blame him for not floating the idea.

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Kevin doesn't exactly keep an open-door policy.

And it's not just Spider-Man: we're also getting a sequel to Man of Steel, despite that being awful. And a Fantastic Four reboot for some reason. And ten more DC properties because Warner Brothers doesn't understand that Marvel is only being successful because they're being fucking careful. If things keep going like this, it's not going to matter if Marvel movies stay good: flooding the market means we're all going to get sick of superhero movies. They'll ruin the freshness of the genre, the specialness, because when every movie is a superhero movie, even the most die-hard fan is going to start wishing for a romantic comedy or a movie about trains or something. So the only solution is that we, as an audience, agree to stop going to see these fucking movies. Pretend they're not happening. And if we have to go -- like, say, it's our job, because we work for a comedy website that covers movies -- we have to promise to do some weird drugs first. That's the only way to preserve our honor.

This isn't even about being "fair" or "progressive" (even though those seem like nice things to be). This is about maintaining the diversity we need to keep interest in this shit. Stories are made interesting by how the characters interact with their surroundings, so having more diverse protagonists means more diverse, interesting stories. And we fucking need that. Otherwise we're not going to get to see these movies anymore, and that'd seriously break my heart.

The most frustrating part is that Kevin Feige, who's in charge of all of Marvel's strategy, doesn't even have a reason he's not doing this. He basically says he wants to but isn't going to, because reasons. Actually, scratch that: He doesn't even get to the "because reasons" point. He just says it'd be great and kinda shrugs. Metaphorically, with his words.

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty
Holy shit, Kevin Feige is really dorky looking?

I honestly can't conceive of why this is happening. Black Widow is proven to be a popular character, and for Christ's sake she's at least as interesting as Thor, right? Right now, the only company planning a superhero movie with a lead female character is Sony, which despite owning the rights to the best superhero character ever (seriously, Spider-Man's origin is perfect) hasn't been able to make a watchable superhero movie happen in 10 years. Their attitude is basically, "Well, literally nothing else is working, so we may as well give this a shot."

There's no reason Marvel can't beat them to the punch. They could get a Black Widow movie out well before 2017, and not only would we all go see it, it'd keep Scarlett Johansson from making movies like Lucy. They can probably get a tax break for that kind of disaster prevention work, right?