Superheroes on a Schedule

Beginning with "Spider-Man" in 2002, the film industry has produced an unprecedented number of films about super heroes. Most people have their own, distinct taste for cinema, preferring, perhaps, romance over action, or light-hearted over heavy/dark movies. Super hero movies, however, seem to be largely immune to this distinction, especially among younger audiences, and, as a result of this universal taste for the supernatural, American youth can feel almost ostracized if they haven't seen the most recent installment of any given hero franchise.

After a decade of hero movies, though, I began to notice certain trends in the screenplays, especially when the movie is considered an "origins story," or how the man becomes the hero.



In an oversimplified sense, every superhero origin movie seemed to me to include 6 main sections:
1. the introduction of characters
2. the acquisition of powers
3. the first heroic deed (or first deed as a hero)
4. the montage of heroic deeds (not as common)
5. the final battle
6. the denouement

I first noticed a trend in the length of these movies. Without knowing anything about the plot or the characters, I could count on any given superhero movie being approximately 2 hours long, most of them only plus or minus a couple of minutes. From there I drew up this table showing what percentage of the way through the movie each event occurs.

	Exposition	Powers	Heroic deed	Montage	Final Battle	Denouement
The Amazing Spiderman	15	20	42	42-44	89-92	92-100
Batman Begins	15	27	48	N/A	90-95	95-100
Captain America	18	32	61	69-72	90-92	92-100
Daredevil	8	8	27	N/A	91-95	95-100
Fantastic Four	13	26	38	N/A	89-95	95-100
Ghost Rider	12	41	47	N/A	92-95	95-100
Green Lantern	19	28	67	N/A	93-96	96-100
Hulk	11	23	33	N/A	94-97	97-100
Ironman	29	53	67	N/A	86-95	95-100
The Mask of Zorro	18	31	37	N/A	90-96	96-100
Men in Black	18	35	49	N/A	90-95	95-100
Spider-Man	9	14	42	47-49	90-95	95-100

bold signifies the high and low outliers which were eliminated from the mean percentage
Also, sorry, to the Halle Berry fans out there, Catwoman wasn't surveyed.




For those of you who are visual thinkers, here's the same date crunched into averages and plugged into our 2-hour timeframe

To tell the truth, this study was less disillusioning than I had originally thought it might be. As it turns out, a lot of the same timing of plot events is shared by Aladdin, Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Wizard of Oz, Inspector Gadget, How to Train Your Dragon, and Flubber.

What I learned instead is that these statistics simply quantify standard story-telling. Therefore, what's most important is that we, as an audience, demand innovation in other areas, such as characterization, cinematography, and dialogue.

tl;dr- Most modern superhero origin movies are modeled after the primordial Star Wars mold