Why the Marvel Filme Need to Kill an Avenger, and NOT Bring Them Back 

Why the Marvel Movies Need to Kill an Avenger, and NOT Bring Them Back

The awesome 'Civil War' is the most Marvel movie so far, but it opens the door to some big creative traps.

In most comic books, people with superpowers fight each other. It\'s crazy and awesome and kind of addictive, but it runs a predictable course. Super strength and claws and special suits and aliens and mutants and power blasts and magic all get mixed up into epic battles that play out in the pages of monthly stories published in 24-page installments. It has heart and emotion and consequences, but then those consequences get rolled back and eventually nothing seems to matter. Then we do it all over again.

This cycle either alienates readers after one or two times through the wringer, or they resign themselves to the tidal movements of comic book fandom. Wax and wane. Death and rebirth. Meaning assigned and erased.

Comic book movies have mostly tried to avoid the cartoonishness of those battles royale specifically to avoid that problem. Christopher Nolan was adamant that everything in 

 trilogy be physically possible in the real world (if ridiculously improbable). Bryan Singer made the divisive decision to banish the traditional blue and yellow X-suits from his 

 smashed the box office in 2008, no one thought traditional comic book heroes dressed in primary colors could actually work, and even that movie went to great lengths to make it look like Tony Stark\'s suit was one near-magical power source away from being a real thing.

is the point where the Marvel Cinematic Universe truly becomes the big screen analogue to the Marvel comic book universe. It\'s a comic book movie that feels more like a comic book than anything else we\'ve ever seen. If you\'re a comic book fan, this is literally the movie you\'ve been waiting for. If you\'re not, and you like the movie, then this might be the thing that gets you to actually buy some comics.

So how could this be the beginning of the end? It\'s so GOOD! Well, here are a list of problems these types of comic books run into that will soon be replicated in the MCU if it doesn\'t change course after 

1. No REAL Consequences: Kudos to Joss Whedon for killing off Agent Coulson and Quicksilver, but Coulson\'s return from the dead on 

foretells a future where eventually one of the core Avengers is going to die and somehow come back to life. If and when that happens, it will destroy any sense of reality in the movies, and also make the audience stop worrying about the characters. It\'s happened countless times in Marvel comics (Captain America and Wolverine are two of the most recent high profile examples), and it seems like only a matter of time before it happens in the movies.

In the Marvel comics universe, Steve Rogers (Captain America) was killed in the aftermath of the \'Civil War\' crossover event in 2007, only to be brought back two years later. 

2. The Stakes Cease to Matter: When every fight is for the fate of the entire world, the fate of the world starts to feel like a concept so abstract it\'s pointless. When the Marvel movies make the stakes personal, it feels like the victories matter more — Tony Stark\'s legacy in 

actually does a pretty good job of subverting this in the end [SPOILERS] by making the movie about the relationship between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. But "the fate of the world" was certainly on everyone\'s mind for much of the run time.

3. The Soap Opera Effect: Once we the audience start to feel our core characters are safe from irreversible consequences, comic book stories tend to gravitate toward stories that resemble either professional wrestling or soap operas. They\'re more about creating and releasing tension either through interpersonal conflict resolution or through physical fight after physical fight, than they are about telling meaningful stories. It\'s not that this can\'t work, but it\'s a style that lends itself far more easily to the episodic nature of television than to the fast-paced 2-hour stories we get a couple times a year. If this happens, the Marvel movies will start to feel too predictable and will inevitably lose the cred they\'ve earned with fans and critics.

, it was said to be because he reached an impasse with Marvel over how they were using his movie to set up the rest of the Marvel universe. The interconnectedness of the MCU is what originally made it such a revolutionary thing, but as these movies become more interconnected, they\'ll also become more bloated with subplots meant to connect to other movies. In small doses these set-ups are fine, and overall enrich the Marvel fan experience, but Wright isn\'t alone in his beef with Marvel. Joss Whedon complained that Marvel heads tried to cram too much other stuff into 

. Eventually, after the Marvel Universe has connected everything all together, the only things that will feel fresh will be stand-alone films that don\'t sync up with the bigger picture in any major ways.

5. Brain Drain and Artlessness: The more Marvel develops a reputation for dictating the content and tone of its pictures, the less auteur filmmakers will want to work with them. Eventually directors will have less and less input, and that will result in a general artlessness that some are already complaining about in 

. The danger is that cinematography, tonality, style, even palettes will become standardized throughout the MCU — much in the same way Marvel Comics itself unified its style based on the workflow pioneered by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The "Marvel Method" became an industry-changing approach to comic creation, and one could argue a "New Marvel Method" is changing the way studios approach movie franchises. It\'s a great way to get a blockbuster franchise up and running, but eventually it\'s all going to start looking the same.

So how can Marvel stave off the end? By killing an Avenger. Or Avengers even! No takesy-backsies. No reincarnations. No clones. No alternate timeline versions of the same character. Just dead forever. When the dust settles on 

, Marvel needs to make top-bill blood sacrifices and stick to them or else we\'ll be stuck with the literally Invincible Iron Man for the next 20 years. Sorry RDJ, but not even you can keep the franchise fresh for that long.

That\'s no silver bullet, obviously. For the Marvel movies to stay relevant, they\'ll need to keep making those one-offs, and get them right. Luring back auteur directors would help quite a bit, even if the studio has to relinquish some control in the process. Basically, after 

, it\'ll be time to change as much as possible while keeping the universe intact. If they don\'t do that, then we\'ll be stuck in the movie version of the downward spiral that nearly ended Marvel Comics in the late \'90s. And that\'s an ending no one\'s rooting for.

I'm the Senior Editor for movies on Zimbio.com, which means I spend way too much time thinking about the geekiest possible ways to approach the cineplex. I'm also hopelessly addicted to audio books. Follow me: Twitter | Google

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