The great joy of the first Avengers was that we’d all happily have sat and watched these characters bicker for two hours. So maybe focus on that, just a bit. Of course, there has to be action – no one’s going to make a $250m movie about off-duty superheroes eating shawarma – but the extent to which it’s the be-all and end-all can be overstated. There’s no question that you need one (or preferably two) genuinely jaw-dropping set pieces (see a few examples here) but you don’t need hours and hours of action. If you hit a couple well enough, that’s all anyone will talk about as they leave the cinema, and only the very curmudgeonly will quibble about the percentage of action to dialogue, before being told to shut up and go watch a Michael Bay film instead.