To be sure, part of the problem is that we’ve seen it all before. Of course action films have saccharine subplots that exist only to lend meaning to their staggering body counts. But in recent years, killing a major character in your average blockbuster has become inert thanks to the increasing use of formulas to create stakes. Take, for example, Blake Snyder’s wildly popular screenwriting guide, “Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need.” Snyder provides step-by-step instructions, as a Lego set does, on how to assemble the necessary 15 pieces of a movie, with each piece representing an important moment in a script (“Set-up,” “Midpoint,” “Bad Guys Close In”) that, when snapped together in the right order, builds the ideal movie. In Synder’s methodology, the death of a major character has a name: The “All Is Lost” moment. When a movie needs to convey a sense of “total defeat” forits protagonist and to its audience, Snyder prescribes administering “the whiff of death.” He writes, “Stick in something, anything that involves a death . . . [because it] will resonate and make that ‘All Is Lost’ moment all the more poignant.”

A Slate article from last year argued that Snyder’s formula has increasingly become dogma in Hollywood, rendering all blockbusters alike. Whether “Save the Cat!” is actually used by screenwriters or merely draws from the repetitive architecture of today’s tent poles is difficult to say. But it doesn’t matter. Filmmakers don’t seem to realize that plot mechanics are no shortcut to pathos.

It’s not unreasonable to expect emotional complexity from blockbuster films, nor is it impossible. Look at “Attack the Block” (2011), a quintessential blockbuster at heart (if not in budget or box office), in which each death — there are many — hits the viewer hard, because the filmmakers put in the effort to make sure it would. Think of some of the all-time greatest movie deaths: Obi-Wan Kenobi in “Star Wars.” Roy Batty in “Blade Runner.” Mufasa in “The Lion King.” Artax the Horse in “The Neverending Story.” Thelma and Louise in “Thelma & Louise.” Marion Crane in “Psycho.” Bambi’s mother in “Bambi.” Vincent Vega in “Pulp Fiction.” Spock in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” Boromir in “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” Tracy’s head in “Seven.” Maximus in “Gladiator.” Even something like Harry Stamper’s sappy demise in “Armageddon” — the most bombastic of blockbusters, a Michael Bay movie — plucked at a heartstring or two.

You don’t see that when Snyderian logic is at work in “Iron Man 3.” Potts’s death is a completely pro forma affair. Stark is given literally seconds to mourn before he is scooted right back into the action. It renders the moment so inconsequential, so blink-and-you’d-miss-it, that you can almost hear the writer’s pencil scratch, “Motivation for Iron Man to unleash hellfire and justify explosive C.G.I. bonanza” off the to-do list. How is an audience supposed to feel that a death matters when the movie doesn’t bother to lend it meaning? Writers are so focused on finding ways to give us crowd-pleasing destructive pyrotechnics that they undermine the required emotional setups without even realizing it. Death has become a mere transition device.

By contrast, Captain Kirk’s death at least aims for emotional resonance, lending it the full weight of its actors’ tears. Still, the moment is so transparently formulaic that its attempt to convince us of its gravity feels patronizing — all the more so because it’s impossible to believe it’s anything but a bluff. We know the “Star Trek” universe, so triumphantly rebooted, isn’t going to kill off its hero. It’s the worst kind of bluff: one so obvious, the bluffer can’t even commit.