Kevin Feige Breaks Silence on Scorsese Attack: "It's Unfortunate"

That's a pretty vague "formula." We're talking about superhero films here, so "hero gains power," and most of the rest of what you list is to be expected. That's like writing off the Godfather film as a formulaic gangster picture because "you have a mob with a boss," "a rival mob wars with them," "gangsters kill one another," "guns are fired," "vengeance is sought," and so forth. A film containing touchstones of its genre is not considered to be merely adhering to a formula.

I'd argue that despite touching on the familiar points that one expects in a superhero film, the MCU films are consistently able to transcend the genre by offering a fresh take nearly every time out. With The Winter Soldier we got a tightly-knit tale of espionage and government corruption, Homecoming gave us a coming-of-age story that was much John Hughes as it was Wes Anderson as it was a superhero film. Ragnarok perfectly blended dark, epic-stakes action with Norse mythology, all the while keeping an undercurrent of dry wit, and owes as much to Monty Python as it does to Stan Lee. Infinity War? Homerian tragedy, and the only superhero film I know of in which the ostensible villain is in fact the hero, who completes his quest and defeats the presupposed heroes. Captain Marvel? A clever film based more on the gradual development of its lead character than with any super-hero-ing, and one in which the action, while in steady supply and entertaining, takes a back seat to a story of Danvers gradually regaining her human-ness. Does Black Panther feel like any of the above? Where do the Guardians of the Galaxy fit into any of this? And Ant-Man-- a comedic heist film where the super powers are again almost secondary to the tale-- is yet another outlier.