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Following on the conversation about Spider-man 3 over on Dan’s blog, I think I’ve stumbled onto a suggestion that I think would work for pretty much every super-hero comic book based movie that I can think of.

The basic idea is that the movie (or at least sequels) should always open with a fight scene during which the primary hero is fighting a second string villain that they would be unlikely to use as a “main” villain in future movies. Right off the bat, scene #1, should be this battle, after which the defeated villain is carted away and never seen again for the rest of the movie, and the primary plot gets kicked off from there. The example in this case would be how I described my opinion of the role Sandman should play in SM3 (see Dan’s post for more specifics on that).

This would give you the following benefits:

1. More action, without needing to set it up. People going to see super hero movies for the most part probably want a healthy dose of good, CGI enhanced fight scenes. Of course, you usually have to have the final confrontation with the main baddy of the film, but it really sucks if that’s the only fight in the whole movie. (It’s even worse if the scene is not that good, but enough about Fantastic Four).
2. Being able to use characters you otherwise wouldn’t. Most of the mainstream comic book characters that movies are being made around these days have a large cast of villains that have accumulated over the decades of storytelling. Many of them would not make good “primary villains” for a single movie, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t make the cut until the 20th or so movie in the series, which even the most popular lines will probably never get to.
3. Not wasting “main plot time”. This one is critical. One only needs to watch the original Batman movie series to see the quality go downhill dramatically as the continued to cram more bad guys into each film. Now, that’s not to say that avoiding it in this case would have made those ones any better, but still, it’s fairly clear to see that when you’re adapting what was originally told as a long running story (often over a period of time measured in years rather than minutes), it’s best to keep the storylines focused and not try to include extraneous stuff that only takes away time from the real story.

Another acceptable way of including additional characters (other than the opening fight scene idea described above) is like they’ve done (well) with the goblin storyline throughout the Spider-man movies so far - Harry’s story is a subplot that continues to develop and tie the movies together while still allowing each one to be fairly self-contained.