The flaw is simply impatience.
I don't think so, since it's a variation of the same mistake media execs have been making for ages, since long before "cinematic universes" became the fashion. Whenever a movie or show succeeds, other studios churn out a bunch of copycat productions of the same genre or format or subject matter (like how
Star Wars spawned a wave of FX-driven action flicks, say), and they end up with a string of flops, because the bosses are businesspeople who don't understand creativity, so they don't realize it's not
what you do, it's
how you do it. The first film didn't succeed because of the format or approach it chose; the format or approach succeeded because its makers did it with skill and freshness.
I have a sort of “critical mass” theory about fictional worlds: Fictional worlds have a pointillist sort of appeal and eventually, if you keep worldbuilding, you sooner or later get to the point where the world is so filled in, so detailed, that further exploration or expansion no longer holds any appeals in and of itself.
This is why so many long-running franchises, like Star Trek, eventually get to a point where they’re more interested in revisiting past ideas than introducing new ones.
Interesting idea, but I'm not convinced. For one thing, a universe like
Star Trek is open-ended in space and time, so you can always expand to new parts of it and don't have to run out of room. For another, the fact that it's happening to multiple different franchises around the same time suggests it's more of a generational thing. For instance, here in the West we have
Star Trek, Star Wars, and
Doctor Who increasingly revisiting their own pasts, while simultaneously in Japan, the major
tokusatsu franchises
Ultraman, Super Sentai, and
Kamen Rider have become driven by a similar nostalgia, with the current heroes deriving their powers and armored/transformed appearances from their predecessors' powers and appearances, or in the case of the past two
Ultraman series, being loose remakes/pastiches of series from 25 years ago. (Although in those cases, a lot of it is driven by the desire to sell toy lines based around classic heroes and monsters.)
I think what happens is that when a franchise gets old enough, it gets taken over by people who grew up as its fans, and they turn it into fan fiction for the parts of it they enjoyed growing up. This happened decades ago in comics, when you increasingly got creators who'd started out as fans, and series that had been moving forward over time, changing team composition etc., started getting reset to their old status quos, character growth reversed, and so on to put things back to the "classic" version. Or a whole continuity that's been rebooted and updated with a new approach gets re-rebooted with old elements being put back in (like whether Superman started out as Superboy in Smallville).
The thing is, creators generally like to move forward and try new things and not repeat themselves, but fans like to revisit what they originally loved. So when fans become creators, you get a tension between those forces. Some creators let their fan side become too dominant.
