What I learned about disruption from The Last Action Hero and Kick-Ass

Once upon a time (OK, the 1980s), action heroes were the biggest superstars in the world. From Mel Gibson's Lethal Weapon to Bruce Willis' Die Hard, all blockbusters had an action hero and a catchphrase.

But then came 1993 and the release of one of Sony's biggest flops: The Last Action Hero.
It was so bad and lost so much money to Sony that you probably ask yourself: Why is it even mentioned here and in the title? Well, there's an excellent reason for that-
The Last Action Hero is one of the most significant market disruptions ever!

Up until its release, the cinema world was dominated by action heroes doing the same thing: saving the world, city, building, bus, and so on. This made the movies very fun but also very boring. There's nothing like a formula to make things predictable, right?

But since Sony's cluster-f*ck, people couldn't view these action heroes similarly. How could they? They just watched one of the biggest stars in movie history making fun of the entire action industry. Every action movie after that looks like... Well... The Last Action Hero. A joke.
That was the end of the era of action heroes as we knew them in cinema and the beginning of superheroes, who made their way to the screen right out of the comic book shops. Movies like Batman and Robin and the Sam Raimi Spiderman trilogy were all the rage.
Right in the middle of it, in 2010, came the release of Kick-ass, the black-comedy superhero movie that, like The Last Action Hero, made fun of an entire genre. After watching it, you could've never watched a superhero in spandex again and actually taken it seriously.

Since then, we have entered the Dark Comics era, with real stories and much more rounded characters—from the Marvel Universe to Logan and, of course, The Dark Knight Trilogy.

So, what can we learn from these movies about disrupting markets?

These movies took a market dominated by strong players and flipped it so hard that you couldn't understand how things worked like they did for so long.
If you want to disrupt and change a market, you need to first research it from top to bottom. Find the weak spots and illuminate them so everyone can see them, too.
Once you have done this, you can fill the gaps with your solution, but make sure it is one that will make people wonder why no one has done it before.
An excellent example of that can be found at the insurance startup Lemonade.
The founders of Lemonade took the most ancient and boring market in the world—home insurance—and made it cool.
Using AI and building an app people love to use, they flipped an annoying process that took days and weeks and was frustrating to customers. Now, anyone who used them cannot understand how he ever used regular home insurance before.
Another one is Casper.
They did the impossible in a huge market: They made people buy mattresses online without testing them at the shop. How did they do it? By giving an amazing experience like no other in this market and by finding the weak spot of the market—the only place you can really try a mattress is at home while actually sleeping on it.
They made this simple—you have 100 days of sleeping with the mattress, and if you don't like it, you can return it, free of charge, no questions asked, and get a full refund. Casper disrupted the market with its ease of use and this promise. And, of course, it is a premium product at a great price.
There are many other examples (someone said AirBnB?), and they all follow the same pattern we get from The Last Action Hero and Kick-Ass: the art of making people look at an old market and wonder how they could've ever gotten used to it the way they did all these years, and then making sure they'll never go back.