Prior to Iron Man, the only decent superhero movie was Superman II. Your mistake is in assuming that the "genre" is anything but a temporary flash in the pan, or that it lends itself to quality. The "problem that plagues these franchises" is they are universal marketing rhetoric designed to be overdubbed in a dozen languages and offend no major culture, while at the same time standing in for a writ-large caricature of American culture for foreign audiences. Subtlety is deliberately written out because elegant cultural references do not play in Bangalore. You know how you know what lucha libre looks like but you don't really consider yourself a fan? That's superhero movies to the rest of the world. They'll sit down and watch them for the spectacle but that's all they are - spectacle. Think, for just a moment, what "Captain America: Civil War" means to the average 19-year-old citizen of Shenzen.