Here is the problem with tension in a modern superhero film, stated as plainly as possible. Avengers: Doomsday is dated for 18 December 2026 and Avengers: Secret Wars for 17 December 2027. Both dates were public long before either film had been seen. Any peril involving a character contracted to appear in the second one is, structurally, decoration.
Games have the opposite arrangement. In Insomniac’s Spider-Man games you have watched Peter Parker die dozens of times, because you were the one who got him killed, and each of those deaths was followed by a reload rather than a funeral. That sounds like the death of stakes. In practice it is the opposite, and the reason why is worth unpacking, because superhero games have become quietly excellent at the one thing the films keep losing.
Suspense is not a property of the plot. It is a property of uncertainty, and uncertainty is now easier to engineer inside a system than inside a release schedule. That is why so much modern entertainment is built around structured chance rather than authored outcomes, a pattern visible everywhere from roguelikes to the free-to-play formats covered in this comprehensive analysis. The mechanism is the same one Insomniac and Rocksteady have been refining for a decade.
The films spoiled themselves, and not with leaks
Marvel did not lose tension because of plot leaks. It lost tension because of scheduling, casting announcements and the basic arithmetic of a shared universe. When a studio needs eighteen months of marketing lead time, it has to tell you who is in the next film, which tells you who survives this one.
AP2HYC has already made a related argument about the sheer volume of output in its piece on minimising the MCU, and volume compounds the problem. The more entries there are, the more each individual one reads as a chapter rather than a story. Chapters are hard to feel afraid for.
Failure has to be possible for tension to exist
Games solved this by making failure ordinary. Not tragic, not final, just ordinary and frequent.
The Arkham predator rooms remain the cleanest demonstration. You enter a room with armed guards, and the game grants you every advantage except the ability to absorb bullets. Getting spotted is not a cutscene, it is a defeat, and you will be sent back to the start of the encounter to try a slower, more careful version of the same plan. The dread is not scripted into the scene. It emerges from the arithmetic of what you can and cannot survive.
The devices doing this work are mostly invisible to the player:
- Detection systems that convert your impatience into consequence
- Resource scarcity, where the gadget you waste now is the one you need later
- Health economies that make a single mistake expensive rather than fatal
- Encounter design that lets an enemy patrol wander somewhere you did not plan for
- Difficulty settings, which are really a dial for how much uncertainty you want
None of these exist in a film, because a film cannot lose.
Your hesitation is part of the scene
The deeper difference is authorship of the pause.
In a film, the moment before the leap lasts exactly as long as an editor decided it should. In a game, it lasts as long as you sit there not pressing the button, and that hesitation is genuinely yours. The scene is waiting for you to be brave, which is a stranger and more uncomfortable feeling than watching someone else be brave on a schedule.
That is why a stealth sequence in a superhero game can produce more physical tension than a citywide battle on screen. One of them is asking you to hold your nerve. The other is asking you to admire a budget.
What the movies still do better
This is not a case for games being the superior medium, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Films remain far better at ensemble payoff, at the composed image, and at emotional compression: a well-cut two-minute sequence can land something that takes a game twenty hours to earn. Films also do not have the problem games have, which is that repetition erodes meaning. When you have thrown the same punch four hundred times, the four hundred and first carries very little dramatic weight, no matter what the script says is at stake. Every action game fights that decay, and most of them lose eventually.
The honest summary is that the two forms have swapped weaknesses. Films used to own tension and now struggle with it because of franchise mechanics. Games used to struggle with it and now own it, at least in short bursts, because their mechanics generate it automatically.
Wolverine is about to test the whole theory
Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine arrives on PlayStation 5 on 15 September 2026, set in the same Earth-1048 continuity as its Spider-Man games, and it presents an interesting design problem.
Wolverine heals. A character who recovers from almost anything removes the health economy that generates dread in every other game of this type. So the studio has to find its tension somewhere else: in what he does rather than what is done to him, in the cost of losing control, or in threats aimed at people who cannot regenerate.
Whether it works will say something useful about the argument above. If the suspense in a Wolverine game comes from the systems rather than the cutscenes, then the point stands and the films have a real problem. If it comes from the cutscenes, then games have simply borrowed the movies’ methods, and the two forms are converging on the same difficulty from opposite directions.
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