It's remarkable how Marvel can have so much talent on hand, so much cash, and so much experience but turn out such uninteresting movies. Chronicle was far from perfect but it was more engaging and more interesting than just about any superhero movie made yet. Marvel has come to care too much about marketing and making money at the expense of telling interesting stories.

Chronicle was pretty dark, but it avoided so many typical pitfalls of similar films. The popular kid at school was a nice guy instead of a jerk, the "bad" guy had some context to him that made him far more compelling (as compared to Ledger's Joker, which was a good performance but a crappy bad guy because he amounted to basically a one-note abstract manifestation of evil), they made the source of their powers a macguffin and didn't try to explain it (which, regardless of source would probably have involved a 30-minute sequence involving confrontations with military soldiers and administrators that we've seen 50 times before), etc.