Maybe the other stories necessitated cutting out the interesting parts of the original plan, but the father-son dynamic in Iron Man 2 dragged to me. Black Widow, by contrast, was fun.
I liked Black Widow and especially her interaction with Happy Hogan.
To me the father-son dynamic dragged mostly because it doesn't really go anywhere. The biggest problem is Fury, who just shows up out of nowhere, telling Stark about his father and where to look for a cure. It's a huge cop-out and simply bad storytelling.
And even the
Avengers subplot doesn't really go anywhere, as Tony is told that he's not a team player. Everything is just there.
The way they tried to cram the bigger universe is as ham-fisted as Stan Lee trying to put the Thing action figure into the Batmobile on his
Simpsons appearance.
It's forced. It's bad. And it reeks of heavy studio interference over a solid plot for the sequel.
Yes, refer back to the films I mentioned. The only example that seemingly rectified that kind of creative difference was Ant-Man because they found another director albeit really late.
The solution isn't finding a 'yes man,' but not making dumb decisions.
As for your examples:
- Except for the Thor subplot, I liked
Avengers: Age of Ultron better than the first one
- On
Spider-Man 3, Sam Raimi was well into pre-production and had already put together a script with his brother Ivan featuring the Sandman, Vulture and Harry Osborn as villains. The studio and producer Avi Arad forced him to Venom in there 'for the fans' last minute, with a release date already set in stone. Do you think getting a 'yes man' on board under the same conditions would've helped? I wouldn't be so sure.
-
X-Men: The Last Stand. Bryan Singer went off to do
Superman Returns, but was still planning to direct the third installment in the
X-Men franchise. The studio decided that they wouldn't wait for him, and instead went on with Matthew Vaughn at the helm. Unfortunately he decided that he didn't have enough time to make the film he envisioned, so him and the studio parted the ways. In comes 'yes man' Brett Ratner, and it worked so well!
- The development and production on the
Amazing Spider-Man franchise has always been a mess. In that case it wasn't so much about Marc Webb and Sony clashing, but about Webb getting pushed around to begin with and not having any chance to put his stamp on them, because the studio execs and producers would go back and forth about what they thought the films should be. To this day no one involved knows who the hell that 'mystery man' (played by Michael Massee, may he R.I.P.) was supposed to be, and where they would've gone with him.
-
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (which I like in it's Ultimate Cut, BTW, except for a couple of things). Not much clashing going on, actually. The film was just cut for runtime reasons. The backlash, however, led to the studio getting cold feet taking away
Suicide Squad from David Ayer, and having the trailer company cut the theatrical version. Which no, shouldn't have happened.
So, I don't really see the pattern you see here, I'm sorry. And creative back and forth is actually a good thing. You should watch the
Twelve Monkeys making of. Lots of Terry Gilliam clashing with the producers and studio in there.
On a side note, I've actually directed (literally) a couple of music videos for friends of mine. And there's always a point where you don't see eye to eye, or you argue about what you think would be the best way to do it. That's just how things are. But in the end we knew we had to get the job done, and we did. I didn't leave, mid-way. And they didn't just do it themselves or call someone else, mid-way. And they were pretty happy about the end results (and even second-guessed some of their own ideas, thinking that they should've listened to me on a few things). Ironically (since we're talking about
Deadpool 2), when it came to our third collaboration, I just didn't like how things were building up and decided I didn't want to do it.