For example, take the recent Avengers movie. It's a typical run-of-the-mill superhero movie - several superheroes (including the Iron Man) band together to save the humanity from strange invaders from the outer space. Could we instead see a movie about the technology beyond the Iron Man's suit being duplicated and mass-produced? After all, the Iron Man is roughly equal in power with the other superheroes in that movie so a battalion of them would have easily kicked invaders' asses.
You missed Iron Man 2. That's roughly what was going on (but the originals still managed to take down the army, same basic plot just different villian).
Such a movie would inevitably have to deal with lots of interesting stuff: the effect on society, governmental structure, place of humanity in the universe, etc. There are superhero movies that attempt to do this, but they are few and far between ("Watchmen" being the only recent one).
Unfortunately they only touched very lightly on that in Iron Man 2, despite doing nearly entirely what you were talking about before. This I think is one of the big problems with these movies at least as far as them being much more than just action for the sake of action.
Another example - science. In most superhero movies scientists are immoral and/or evil. They mostly do experiments on people (usually without consent of the test subjects) that later backfire. Alternatively, scientists along with their backers work on evil world domination schemes. And if a scientist is not evil, then he or she is most likely going to be exposed to their own experiment resulting in them gaining some superpower by accident. Is it such a wonder that science loses popularity in the USA?
There's a few counter examples in this, most notably would be the scientists in the captain america movies, but in the long run a number of the story all of them end up dead (according to the comics, cartoons, etc.). So it's just a slightly different take on the same concept. I've got to agree with you there.
