Have you noticed that, just when you thought Hollywood’s superhero boom must finally be ready to burst, another one turns up in our cinemas?

Surely the worlds of Marvel and DC Comics must have been plundered for all possible plots and character permutations by now, but it would seem that this is very far from the case.

However, there must be a finite lifespan for this kind of movie, just like the disaster movies of the 70s like Earthquake and Towering Inferno which had their time in the spotlight but then just faded away. Most recently, we’ve seen the YA franchise boom that started with Twilight and peaked with The Hunger Games come to an apparent end with the news that the final Divergent movie won’t even be released in cinemas.

Many think the studios’ desire to wring every penny and cent from cinemagoers reached its natural pinnacle in the year’s Batman v Superman in which a supremely contrived plot pitted two forces who are generally for good against each other.

But unfortunately it seems like the big studios have taken the famous words of the screenwriter William Goldman to heart when he said “Nobody knows anything… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one”.

With so much money at stake, therefore, the usual thinking is that it’s much safer to stick with a winning formula than to go out on a limb, or a hunch, that a whole new kind of film or genre will get the box-office tills ringing.

Naturally, crucial to this is having an audience that are ready and willing to spend their hard-earned cash at the cinema. What’s more, it’s best if that audience can cross over as many age groups as possible and superhero films do this quite effectively. For younger children they like comic-book heroes while teenagers like the flashy action. Meanwhile, for young adults it offers the appeal of seeing characters that they grew up with, probably in comic book form, re-imagined and rebooted for the big screen and the 21^st century.

Then there’s the merchandising opportunities. The scope is wide open not only for merchandising of action figures, T shirts, posters and all the other paraphernalia that go hand in hand with superhero movies but also in many other areas too. These can include tie-ins with products and retailers, and even the creation of branded online slots.

With DVD sales forming a less important part of a film’s revenue stream in this age of the online download it’s impossible to overestimate the importance of merchandise, especially for films that underperform in terms of box-office takings.

This leads us on to the last reason why these kinds of films are so popular with studios and that’s because even when the critical reception is poor actual cinemagoers still seem happy to go and see the movie anyway. Just look at the recent success of the thoroughly panned Suicide Squad.

So with bulletproof success like this, not to mention a constant line of Hollywood A-listers lining up to appear in the various superhero franchises, it looks like they’ll all be with us for some time to come.