The Avengers
Hollywood’s unlikeliest heroes.
Iron Man, the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was an independent production when it released in 2008 under the banner of Marvel Films. Looking back, it had all the typical pieces of an indie darling. Jon Favreau was a distinct directorial voice[1], Robert Downey, Jr. was a noteworthy-but-tarnished lead[2], and Iron Man as a property was niche and unproven. The movie felt like a college student walking around in an untailored suit—professional, but doubtless with some growing to do.
Like that college student, Iron Man had ambitions, too. It hinted at those ambitions in what was then a highly unusual bonus post-credits scene, in which an eyepatch-wearing Samuel L. Jackson approached Tony Stark about “the Avengers initiative.”
In the moment, the line felt more like a tingle than a electric charge. Stingers—another term for scenes that play after a movie’s credits—were more commonly reserved for bloopers and gags in those days, so it wasn’t clear whether we should’ve interpreted the Avengers quote as something serious or something trite. Now, of course, stingers can set up entire sequels or change the meaning of the movie that preceded them, like the one in Avengers: Infinity War heralding the arrival of Captain Marvel or the one in Ant-Man introducing the Wasp.
In fact, way back in 2008, most moviegoers weren’t even savvy to the fact more Marvel movies were even happening, so the idea of the franchise combining multiple storylines wasn’t in the realm of possibility.
Even from the standpoint of Marvel Films themselves (they wouldn’t become known as Marvel Studios until Disney acquired them for $4 billion in 2009), Jackson’s line wasn’t a guarantee an Avengers movie was on the way. In 2008, Marvel’s filmmaking dreams were too precarious to even promise an Iron Man 2, let alone movies about other characters with the intent of staging a future crossover. When Jackson uttered his now-famous line, the studio was in the tank. It was only the herculean efforts of a rocket-suit wearing billionaire that kept them from financial ruin.
Today, we like to think the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was—in the words of the franchise’s best villain—inevitable, but it wasn’t. The modern ubiquity of the characters overshadows all the tiny things that had to go right for the teaser of Iron Man’s stinger to be fulfilled. The MCU was not a guarantee, but the franchise’s[3] underlying methods proved so potent that upon its success, it changed the entire studio system in Hollywood. Never before has a single group of properties caused such a sea change in the movie industry, and if the MCU’s subsequent imitators are any indication, it seems more and more the case that the earth-rupturing impact left by The Avengers is something we’ll never see again.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe now spans two dozen movies, a number only bested by the James Bond franchise. But while Bond took a half-century to reach 26 movies, the MCU reached 24 in just 11 years. The breakneck pace and enormous scale of the MCU make it hard to focus on one particular star in its galaxy, but for all the shifts of the franchise since Iron Man, you can still spot the giant, bright dot that’s The Avengers. After all the Wars and Endgames and Homecomings, it’s easy to forget how unbelievable The Avengers felt in 2012. You couldn’t believe it was possible even as you were watching it.
As much as that awe came from The Avengers’ quality—it’s indeed a great movie—in 2012 it felt completely nuts The Avengers could exist in the first place, let alone be any good. Popular culture had no precedent for this type of accomplishment.
Marvel Films planted the seed for The Avengers back in 2006, when they announced a slate of upcoming movies including Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, an Ant-Man movie directed by Edgar Wright, and a movie about Samuel L. Jackson’s eyepatch guy, Nick Fury[4]. This roster of heroes wasn’t exactly eye-popping at the time, and that’s because Marvel Films was then in the habit of selling the rights to its most popular characters to other studios. Spider-Man belonged to Sony at the time, and 20th Century Fox had the X-Men. It left Marvel with a roster of cultural B-listers, but nonetheless, new executives at the studio decided they could make more money in the long run if they took calculated gambles on their own properties and started making movies in-house[5]. They decided Iron Man would be the first film on a path that—fingers crossed—would eventually lead to The Avengers, and thus the concept of the “cinematic universe,” which would weave different movies together and intersect their stories and characters, was born.
But when Iron Man entered production, that five-year plan was still very much a pipe dream. In fact, the movie was literally a go-for-broke endeavor for Marvel. In order to produce Iron Man, the studio took out a $525 million loan from Merrill Lynch, putting up the rights to characters like Dr. Strange and Black Panther as collateral in case they couldn’t pay it back. If Iron Man flopped, Marvel Films would have gone under. What’s worse, it would have been looted for its intellectual property.
But thanks to some savvy personnel choices—the greatest of which was to combine star Robert Downey Jr.’s insecure narcissist schtick with director Jon Favreau’s generous attitude—and a scrappy, human-centric script, Iron Man went off like gangbusters. The movie made $585 million worldwide, busting Marvel Films out of debt and catching the eye of Disney, who scooped up the studio for over $4 billion in 2009.
This new corporate relationship would forever alter the way the movies were planned, packaged, and produced, but more on that later. The immediate consequence of the acquisition meant the newly named Marvel Studios had a clear financial path to build Phase One of the MCU toward The Avengers. More standalone movies began to roll out.
Nothing replicated the critical success of Iron Man, but nothing was bad enough to derail the whole endeavor. Sure, The Incredible Hulk sucked and Iron Man 2 sputtered, but Captain America was solid and Thor had a bunch of pretty people in it. At the least, you could see future Avengers in those movies, and none of them lost money[6].
Even if The Avengers was sure to happen at that point, baggage from the fraught Marvel Films era was threatening the movie’s quality. That was a problem, and it’s at this juncture that the most important person in the MCU, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, left his first major mark on the franchise.
Kevin Feige was reared on the nerd culture of the 1980s: Spielberg classics, space operas, Trek, and comic books. His love of movies tugged him toward USC’s film school[7], after which he landed some production assistant jobs before being hired into Marvel’s film arm in 2000. Feige’s comics knowledge gave him a leg up on his peers, and by the turn of the millennium, he was earning associate producer gigs for X-Men and Spider-Man. By 2007, he was the president of Marvel Films, and he retained his title through the Disney acquisition.
Feige was a shrewd, corporate-friendly executive—he cared about making money for Disney—but on the brink of The Avengers, he showed remarkable reverence for his studio’s superhero properties, and he made some key chess moves not to necessarily make The Avengers more profitable, but just plain make it better. His construction of the MCU was born as much from his comics fandom as his business savvy, and he wanted to deliver something to audiences that rewarded their loyalty to his beloved characters from Iron Man to now. Feige’s first move, then, was to install talent on The Avengers who understood the comics and characters like he did.
The Avengers, conceptually, faced one significant problem: Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America were fundamentally disparate, noncomplementary characters. Their worlds—Iron Man’s labs, Cap’s trenches, Thor’s palaces—didn’t make sense together and couldn’t really be combined in a sensical way. Nonetheless, Feige figured if the comics could pull off a mash-up of all these different styles, he could do the same with the movies. As he once put it: “Anything in a comic book has the potential to look silly. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to make it look cool.”
But early in The Avengers’ development process, some people had the wrong idea of “cool.” The original Avengers screenwriter was Zak Penn. He’s still credited for his work on the movie, but his attempt at a script was too…Marvel Films-ish for Feige’s taste[8]. Feige booted Penn and handed things over to his hand-picked director for The Avengers: Joss Whedon.
Whedon’s involvement with The Avengers pervades the style of the MCU to this day. Best known for creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly for TV, Whedon had a track record of nurturing beloved cult properties[9], but more important to Feige, he loved comics. The duo was quick to find a common wavelength and riff about what The Avengers would look like.
The early consensus: It wouldn’t resemble Penn’s script. Whedon did an intensive re-write, his primary mission being to ground all the superhero stuff in that classic Marvel ingredient: humanity. Whedon said later about the draft he revised: “There was a line in the stage direction that said, apropos of nothing, ‘And then they all walk toward the camera in slow motion, because you have to have that.’ Well, no. You have to earn that.”
Whedon’s biggest challenge, however, was making sense of the Avengers coexisting in the same space. How do you combine Iron Man’s advanced tech, Captain America’s period fatigues, Thor’s fantasy ritz, Hulk’s…Hulk-ness, Black Widow’s spy kit, and Hawkeye’s pew-pew shooty-shooty bow-and-arrow absurdity into a single image that doesn’t feel totally bonkers? People wouldn’t be able to invest in the human side of the story—Feige’s ultimate wish for every Marvel movie—if they couldn’t see past a messy collage of heroes. The solution was to lean into the mess.
As Whedon recalled the breakthrough: “These guys just didn’t belong together. Then I was like, ‘Wait a minute. That’s the movie. It’s The Dirty Dozen.’” The Avengers was going to cover the same conflict he was having with the movie itself.
Feige was onboard. “The danger of The Avengers was being overwhelmed with so many superheroes, so much spectacle, so many visual effects,” he said. “We knew there would be plenty of that, but the most interesting thing about the Avengers is why they’re in the same room together, and Joss showed he wouldn’t lose the characters among the spectacle.”
And the miracle of the movie is how the audience doesn’t lose them, either.
The Avengers is a CGI-laden blockbuster, but it pulls off its Dirty Dozen mission in spite of its scale. The first half of the movie, when the heroes meet and fight and argue and flex their powers and size each other up, is peak Marvel. Whedon’s knack for banter grounds the characters so they manifest more as frustrated coworkers than aspirational saviors, and while there’s plenty of comic-book wish fulfillment—Thor fights Hulk, Cap blocks Iron Man’s laser beams with his shield, Hawkeye does a slow-mo falling bow shot—all of it is rooted in the Avengers’ internal conflict. These moments service the story as much as they service fans.
Things become a little less electric in the third act, when the Avengers resolve their differences and shift their focus to the villain Loki, battling the baddie’s invading army of aliens while he waves a staff from atop a skyscraper[10]. This final fight scene, later referred to in the MCU (annoyingly) as the Battle of New York, is a typical CGI Jackson Pollack of explosions and destruction[11], but it climaxes with a strong Iron Man moment, an immortal Hulk line, and one of the most iconic shots in modern movies: The circular pan around the Avengers when they “assemble” for the first time[12].
But overall, The Avengers is an incredible accomplishment. On paper, it’s hard to conceive of a crossover movie like this making sense visually or narratively, and yet, Whedon, Feige, and the incredible cast prove the perfect ingredients to make it a success. One of the biggest successes in movie history, actually.
The Avengers’ box office statistics are so wild listing them off is like reciting the numbers for a Hall of Fame baseball player. Consider first the movie had a reported $220 million budget, then take a look at these figures:
In the United States, The Avengers made $623 million. Internationally, it pulled $895 million for a global total just north of $1.5 billion.
At the time of the movie’s release in 2012, these figures ranked third on both the all-time global box office and the all-time domestic box office (behind only Avatar and Titanic).
Even today, Avengers is eighth on the all-time domestic list and seventh on the all-time global list.
The Avengers’ worldwide opening weekend totaled $392 million, fourth all-time.
The Avengers is the twelfth movie ever to make over $1 billion. It’s tied with Avatar and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 as the movies that reached 10 figures the fastest (it took just 19 days).
Adjusted for ticket price inflation, Avengers ranked 27th on the all-time domestic box office list at the time of its release (its 30th today, having been passed by Jurassic World and Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015 and Avengers: Endgame in 2019)[13].
At the time, Avengers was the highest-grossing movie ever to be released by the Walt Disney Company.
That last point was a major difference maker for the future of the MCU. The Avengers’ unprecedented success convinced Marvel Studios’ corporate overlords at the Mouse House to hand them a stack of blank checks to keep their cinematic universe going, and they did just that, kicking off a wave of sequels and standalones that would make up what they called Phase Two, to repeat the cycle of Phase One and culminate in another Avengers movie.
Phase Two saw the MCU begin to diversify. The franchise brought in more outside creative voices and called up more obscure heroes from their well of intellectual property. Now that it had been established audiences could tolerate the dorkiness of Thor and the earnestness of Captain America, it was safe to introduce them to the goofy hand-wavey powers of Dr. Strange or the rough-and-tumble chutzpah of Ant-Man.
The biggest sign of Disney’s confidence in Marvel was their greenlighting of 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, an actual Dirty Dozen-type movie starring a former sitcom bit player[14], a pro wrestler, Bradley Cooper as a gun-crazy raccoon and Vin Diesel as that raccoon’s best friend, a grunting tree. Helmed by B-movie schlockster James Gunn, Guardians combined a renegade director and unlikely cast with one of Feige’s riskier swings to produce a movie with a special kind of fuck-it energy. It’s the most audacious and surprising MCU movie by a mile
Because besides Guardians, Disney still kept the MCU on a leash in Phases Two and Three, even if the leash was longer than it was during Phase One. The post-Avengers Marvel movies are a huge testament to Feige’s ability to be both a creative ally for filmmakers and a trustworthy company man for Disney[15]. He lets the franchise experiment a little, but never so much that Disney worried.
MCU critics might bemoan Disney’s oversight, but the Mouse House has had good reason to take a careful approach to evolving the franchise, especially given how many other cinematic universes have failed in the wake of The Avengers. You don’t need to look any further than longtime Marvel rival DC to see the precariousness of this type of enterprise.
Back in the day, DC properties trounced their Marvel counterparts at the movies[16], but now, they’re rushing to catch up, and their hurriedness is only highlighting the actual deftness required to make a successful cinematic universe. When the MCU began Phase One, DC was on their laurels, riding high from Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight movies and content to let their IP rest for a while. When The Avengers hit, it became clear they were missing out on huge financial returns, and they began scrambling to replicate the MCU with Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
Right away, what was fast-christened the DC Extended Universe appropriated its own version of everything the MCU was doing, from a house style to a symbolic creative head to big-name casting. Most of its precedents were established with 2013’s Man of Steel, a metallic, sci-fi take on Superman directed by action-spectacle fetishist Zack Snyder. Man of Steel did away with the aspirational Supes of the Christopher Reeves days and replaced him with a troubled, brooding alien. Critics were divided from the outset[17], but time sullied the movie’s reputation even further, thanks to the way its doom-and-gloom tone pervaded the rest of the DCEU and fast became tiresome and pretentious.
Snyder moved from his alt-take on Superman to his alt-take on Batman in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, a movie that tried to redeem the perceived slights of Man of Steel, introduce a new Batman, and set up an incoming Justice League movie at the same time. The result was one of the worst movies of the decade, replete with nasty-looking visual effects, idiotic plot twists, a really weird Jesse Eisenberg performance as Lex Luthor, and some Snyder-isms so egregious they felt like parody[18].
Things did not improve with the pit stain of 2016’s Suicide Squad or even the first Justice League movie in 2017, which was so mediocre it might be the only Justice League movie we’ll ever have[19]. The DCEU has a little hope in Wonder Woman, which despite a cacophonous third act delivers a winning, inspiring first 90 minutes. Patty Jenkins was the perfect director for the story, and Gal Gadot became an icon overnight as the title character.
Though most of the DCEU movies made solid money (Wonder Woman was the third-highest grossing movie of 2017), the universe was crippled by a lack of creative coherence and foresight. The Avengers had inertia because its preceding movies created buy-in to its roster of characters and paved a smooth narrative runway for these heroes to come together[20]. The DCEU feels slapdash and misguided. It presents its Superman as tortured, its Batman as a vengeful recluse, its Aquaman as a frat-bro sea god[21], and its Wonder Woman as an idealistic romantic who, next to everyone else, seems to belong in a different (more enjoyable) universe. Cyborg and The Flash also appear in Justice League, but they aren’t well-developed. Cyborg is little more than roster filler—DC has no future plans for him at all at this point—and The Flash’s upcoming movie has been mired in development hell since 2013 (its release is currently and dubiously planned for 2021).
Other non-Marvel attempts at a cinematic universe have failed, too. Disney’s attempts to build out Star Wars after acquiring it from Lucasfilm were tied to an ambitious 10-year plan, but misjudged story choices lead to poor returns, and several spin-off films had to be scrapped. Universal Studios, for a time, had a so-called “Dark Universe” in motion, meant to reboot and combine classic horror stories like Dracula, The Mummy, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein. They made one bad Mummy picture with Tom Cruise before poor box-office receipts flushed the entire thing down the drain[22].
Cinematic universes are immense production challenges. Marvel’s gentle boundary-pushing might piss off moviegoers who want more visual and narrative diversity, but it’s clear when taking stock of the film industry that inching from the staid-ness of 2011’s Thor to the zonkers laser light show of 2018’s Thor: Ragnarok over the course of seven long years is probably the only way to sustain this model. You might read Feige’s talk of genre-fication and experimentation as overblown, but from his perspective as the middleman between a bunch of creatives and Disney’s strict corporate guidelines, taking Captain America from The First Avenger to The Winter Soldier is a bold risk. With this much money at stake and these kind of far-reaching plans in mind, each inch might as well be a mile. Feige’s done an incredible job keeping things fresh after 11 years and two-dozen movies.
The MCU’s singular success means this era of Hollywood is defined more by the Avengers themselves than their cinematic universe model. It seems unlikely anyone else will be able to replicate it. So many things have to go right—casting, directorship, corporate approval, ticket sales, narrative coherence, visual consistency—to create a universe, so the safer bet is tapping proven fan bases and making movies out of established intellectual property. If a universe is the single biggest thing in Hollywood right now, IP is the single biggest trend.
As much as The Avengers is the reason we have so many imploded universes across the 2010s, it’s even more so why we have movies based on Legos, emojis, Angry Birds, and worship songs. It’s the reason Disney is remaking all its animated classics as live-action movies. It’s the reason dormant or dead franchises like Jason Bourne, Hellboy, Creed/Rocky, and Godzilla are all back with reboots. It’s the reason The Conjuring and The Fast & the Furious have prequels and spin-offs. Most cynically, Avengers is the reason only six original-concept, non-adaptation movies have finished in the year-end top-ten of the domestic box office since 2012[23]
Is this bad for movies? Does it hail the doom of intrepid moviemaking? Does it signify a creatively bankrupt Hollywood? The temptation is to check “yes” to all three, but there are silver linings amid the IP gold rush of the 2010s.
First, movies like The Avengers making tons of money isn’t bad for movies in and of itself. Ticket sales have declined throughout the 2010s, and so if Hollywood has to prop itself up on tentpoles like the MCU and Fast and the Furious new Jurassic Park movies, fine. We could do worse.
Second, while it’s fair to point out the ways the MCU model is slow to experiment with style and form, there’s still plenty of bold filmmaking elsewhere. It’s just not as accessible as it was 10-20 years ago. Since major studios now push more of their chips toward established IP, there’s little money left for them to finance less proven movies and less proven moviemakers. With ticket sales down, producers can’t afford to take a “risk” on an original idea that might not hit with untested audiences. The result is a financing model that sees studios put out a few $100 million blockbusters a year and a handful of low-budget arthouse films, but very few movies that fall in between. Mid-budget productions that cost somewhere in the $25-75 million range have disappeared. Studios either spend big to win big or spend small and hope for a tidy return.
Finally, it’s absurd to see The Avengers as a sign Hollywood is out of ideas. As we’ve discussed exhaustively, it’s actually impressive how creative and ambitious many of the MCU movies have turned out to be, from Captain America’s nationality tensions to Spider-Man’s youthful anxieties to Thor’s macho posturizing to Black Panther’s racial isolationism. If anything, the MCU should be encouraging, a sign that no matter how IP-dependent Hollywood becomes, there will always be an element of artistry inside its corporate mechanisms. Behind every CGI battle and alien spaceship is an artist looking to express an idea.
That’s the ultimate victory of The Avengers. For all the business savvy behind the movie’s conception and existence, it doesn’t read as a cynical exercise. It’s a joyous, celebratory, eager-to-please movie that looks to reward its viewers for not just the price of their ticket, but the price of every ticket they’re purchased for a Marvel movie. How can you say it’s not worth it? The Avengers boasts a slew of amazing stars, a crack director, terrific action, sharp dialogue, impressive set pieces, surprising narrative balance, and all the comforts of a good old-fashioned time at the movies. A corporate takeover has never been this much fun.
[1] Favreau had gained prominence as Vince Vaughn’s hapless buddy in 1996’s Swingers. In 2001 his directorial feature Made, also starring himself and Vaughn, became his stepping stone to mainstream filmmaking. He landed the Iron Man gig after proving himself capable of handling big budgets and A-list stars on Elf in 2003 and the Jumanji-ripoff Zathura in 2005. Since entering the MCU, he’s been a company man for Disney and Marvel through and through, captaining Iron Man 2 as well as live-action remakes of The Jungle Book and The Lion King.
[2] Downey’s rise and fall and resurrection are well-established parts of his mythos. He was a hyped Hollywood rising star in the 90s, earning major award nominations for his dramatic work and major media attention for his Brat Pack affiliations. At the turn of the millennium, Downey was in and out of rehab in the face of multiple drug charges, but he revived his career in the mid-00s with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Zodiac, and an Oscar-nominated role in Tropic Thunder. From 2008 to 2019, he was Iron Man, one of the highest-paid, most sought-after actors in Hollywood barely a half-decade after being fired off sets for being too inebriated to work.
[3] We’ll refer to the MCU as a “franchise” in this essay for the sake of ease. Though each individual character can be said to have their own franchise within the MCU, we’ll forsake that terminology here and put everything under the same umbrella.
[4] Of these movies, only Nick Fury didn’t come to fruition. Edgar Wright was eventually booted from Ant-Man for creative differences, but the movie did eventually come out in 2015 under director Peyton Reed.
[5] Ironically, it was the incredible financial success of those externally-made Spider-Man and X-Men movies that convinced Marvel Films to start making their own movies in the first place.
[6] The lowest domestic total of Phase One belongs to Hulk, and that made $134 million. In fact, no movie in the MCU has ever lost money, and every single one took first place at the box office on its opening weekend.
[7] Feige now has one of those classic “nobody believed in him” legends attached to his name. Some sources say he was rejected from USC five times before his sixth application was accepted.
[8] The dissonance makes sense. Penn was a writer for X2, X-Men: The Last Stand, and The Incredible Hulk. Those last two movies saw their own share of creative conflict, as The Last Stand was marked by a terrible behind-the-scenes battle between director Bryan Singer and Fox, and Hulk saw star Edward Norton seize control of the script to deliver his more personal take on the character. The Avengers might be the only case in Penn’s career where creative conflict over his treatment actually ended up making the movie better. For The Avengers, he just wasn’t the right fit.
[9] Two more fun IMDB credits for Whedon: He wrote the cult horror movie Cabin In the Woods (starring Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth) and directed the classic Office episode “Business School,” in which Steve Carell’s Michael Scott guest lectures a college course and throws candy bars at students.
[10] Marvel would struggle with villains for most of the decade. Besides Loki, Phases One and Two of the MCU farted villains out of an assembly line, never introducing baddies more creative than dark versions of the hero or domination-seeking power-grabbers. Iron Man fought corrupted techies in all three of his movies (though Shane Black gave the third flick’s villain a fun Shane Black-ian twist). Ant-Man fought Mantis. Hulk fought the Abomination. Thor fought other gods. Captain America fought a disappointing version of Red Skull before ultimately fighting institutions (his sequel movies, Winter Soldier and Civil War, featured multi-faceted antagonists that made for rich thematic explorations, but no formidable singular bad guys). Even the Guardians of the Galaxy couldn’t find a cool antagonist. It wasn’t until Phase Three brought the Avengers to Thanos’ doorstep that things took a positive turn. Thanos has numerous iconic moments to his name, a major chunk of Avengers: Infinity War devoted to his development, and an underappreciated Josh Brolin vocal performance behind him. The new Spider-Man movies similarly used A-list talent (Michael Keaton and Jake Gyllenhaal) to elevate B-list villains (the Vulture and Mysterio), but it’s Black Panther’s baddie who reigns supreme in the MCU thus far. Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger was so magnetic and complex he garnered semi-serious nomination buzz for the 2019 Oscars. He fell short, but Panther landed a Best Picture nom, becoming the first superhero movie to earn that recognition.
[11] Little tidbit: This particular Jackson Pollack painting of explosions had to be careful about how it depicteda war-torn New York. After 9/11, blockbuster action movies in general try to stay away from the city because there are so many emotional pitfalls in terms of what you can show without triggering people, especially when it comes to explosions, destructions, cops, and firefighters. Avengers does a good job of being sensitive about these things (Whedon even gives the NYPD a nice little scene in which they help the Avengers evacuate a dangerous area), but it’s so cautious about New York’s iconography you kind of forget the battle’s in the city at all. Anyway, this is why most large-scale movie battles happen in LA or Chicago. You can’t blow up New York.
[12] It’s a bit of a bummer to learn this shot is a CGI composite of the actors. In fact, almost the entire 30-minute sequence of the Battle of New York is computer-generated, even the locations. It’s too bad in a romantic sense, but impressive in a technical sense; plenty of later Marvel movies, especially the ones that go to space, have explosion-riddled set pieces that look way worse than this one.
[13] This list is a great internet dive. For a sense of the adjustment scale, The Avengers made $623 million in 2012 money but $692 million in adjusted money. Gone with the Wind, meanwhile, is the all-time adjusted leader in the United States. It made $200 million in 1939 money (!) but its adjusted gross is $1.8 billion (!!) for American ticket sales alone (!!!). Other movies over $1 billion in adjusted gross: Star Wars, The Sound of Music, E.T., Titanic, The Ten Commandments, Jaws, and Doctor Zhivago. Twelve post-2000 movies are in the Top 50: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (#11), Avatar (#15), Avengers: Endgame (#16), Jurassic World (#25), The Avengers (#30), Black Panther (#31), The Dark Knight (#33), Avengers: Infinity War (#36), Shrek 2 (#38), Spider-Man (#41), Star Wars: The Last Jedi (#44), and The Incredibles 2 (#49).
[14] This was Chris Pratt as Star Lord, a role that transformed him from fart-joke specialist on Parks and Recreation to one of the biggest leading men in Hollywood. Pratt’s opening scene in Guardians, in which he dances alone in a space cave to Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love,” is his version of Tom Cruise’s sock slide in Risky Business: He’s so funny in it, so charismatic, and so original, his subsequent success was all but guaranteed.
[15] The concept of the later Marvel movies toying with genre is real, but overblown. The most cited examples are Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which is spiced like The Parallax View or All the President’s Men, and Thor: Ragnarok, which sandblasts away Thor’s pretentions in favor of a Galaxy Quest-style space romp. The Winter Soldier has suggestions of a political thriller, but its priorities are with the comic-book stuff first. Same with Ragnarok and its sci-fi shenanigans. Similar claims have been made about Black Panther’s geopolitical leanings and Spider-Man: Homecoming’s teen-comedy tone, but when you put these flicks next to their true genre brethren, their adherence to the Marvel formula really stands out. And even though Phases Two and Three of the MCU have housed numerous respected names in the film industry, only Black Panther has been considered as something more than a fleeting blockbuster, a movie with ideas and an eye for things that don’t fall cleanly into Marvel’s house style. For the most part, Marvel movies still look and feel like Disney-financed superhero movies, and while that canbe both bland and satisfying, it’s still remarkable how something like the original Thor evolved into Ragnarok under the Disney thumb. Maybe by 2030, a Marvel movie will blow away cinephiles and lay audiences alike.
[16] Before Iron Man kicked off the MCU, Marvel’s biggest cinematic successes were two out of three X-Men movies, two out of three Spider-Man movies, and Blade. Otherwise, DC boasted Christopher Reeves’ incredible original run as Superman, Christopher Nolan’s peerless Dark Knight trilogy, and Tim Burton’s wacky Batman flicks. Marvel’s counters were Daredevil, Elektra, The Punisher and a few unholy Fantastic Four films. I know this isn’t delicate, but what the fuck was Marvel thinking in the early 2000s? That a blind martial arts expert and Frank Castle were gonna do shit against fucking Superman? It’s absurd. The way Marvel flipped this script is absolutely insane.
[17] Man of Steel probably would have been better received if it wasn’t a Superman movie. Snyder had some interesting ideas about how an all-powerful being would interact with humans who expect him to be their savior, but since he funneled those conflicts through Superman, who’s typically aspirational and hope embodied, those ideas felt like a misfire. Superman glowered and fretted and resisted his heroism for two and a half hours in Man of Steel, and while it was a marginally interesting character study, it was hard to call that character Superman.
[18] There’s a workout montage in this movie. Swear to God. It shows Ben Affleck’s Batman as he trains to confront Superman. He’s doing all these weighted pull-ups with chains wrapped around him and a bunch of battle rope exercises and he’s sweating a lot and the soundtrack is absolutely blasting heavy metal music. And this is, like, not even in the top-five dumbest moments in the movie.
[19] Maybe. Justice League has such a troubled production there are rumors of a secret cut of the film in existence that delivers something closer to an Avengers-quality experience. Zack Snyder was the movie’s original director, but family trouble caused him to depart the project before the editing stage. A few people swooped in to save the day, most notably Joss Whedon, who had become a Marvel ex-pat a few years earlier (long story short: Whedon left Marvel over creative differences during the production of Avengers: Age of Ultron, possibly sabotaging the movie on his way out). Whedon and Co.’s patchwork on Justice League apparently muddled Snyder’s vision so much he refuses to see the theatrical release of the film to this day. Now, there’s a tiny pocket of internet fans calling for Warner Bros. to release “the Snyder cut” of Justice League, a version reportedly more consistent with Snyder’s alternative interpretations of Superman and Batman as depicted in Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman. Over the years, the Snyder cut has become one of those film legends that refuses to die, with people as notable as Jason Momoa, Aquaman himself, saying it exists and that it’s, quote, “Sssssiiiiiiccccckkkkkk.” Related: It’s impossible to tell if Jason Momoa is the absolute worst or the absolute best.
[20] The other thing that becomes clear when comparing the two franchises is how important casting is to building a sustainable cinematic universe, and how the MCU did a truly masterful job of putting the right people in the right roles. Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man is iconic, same with Chris Evans’ Captain America and Chris Hemsworth’s Thor. We’ve discussed the savvy call-up that was Chris Pratt to the Star Lord role, but an even more impressive decision might be Tom Holland as Peter Parker. That kid had people calling him the best Spider-Man ever after just a cameo appearance in Captain America: Civil War. Other great picks further down the roster include Hayley Atwell as Agent Carter, Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie, Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, Jon Favreau as Happy, Tom Hiddleston as Loki, Josh Brolin as Thanos, and Latitia Wright as Shuri in Black Panther. The only two “misses,” as things look now, are Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa and Brie Larsen as Captain Marvel. They’re both fine, but they’re a little stiff next to the towel-snapping looseness of just about everyone else. Some people say that’s by design—T’Challa’s a king and Captain Marvel’s an alien, after all—but you still don’t quite connect with them in the same way you do Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury, for example. Still, damn. They nailed so many of these.
[21] The Aquman movie that inexplicably followed the Justice League movie is actually pretty fun. It’s the most MCU-ish of the DCEU movies, so it has more jokes and charisma than anything involving Superman or Batman. Plus, the ending fight scene has Aquaman riding a giant sea monster voiced, for some reason, by Julie Andrews, so it can’t be all that bad.
[22] The fall of the Dark Universe is tragic in a rather hilarious way. Universal announced the endeavor after releasing the 2014 movie Dracula Untold, which wasn’t supposed to be in a universe, but was retooled at the last second after someone presumably had the last-second idea to combine it with a bunch of other monster movies. The Dark Universe proper began and ended with 2017’s The Mummy, which made only $80 million in the U.S. next to a $125 million budget. Just a couple weeks before The Mummy released, Universal really tried to hype people up to see all these new takes on monsters. They announced a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde movie with Russell Crowe, an Invisible Man movie with Johnny Depp, and a Bride of Frankenstein movie with Javier Bardem. After The Mummy tanked, they took it all back. Cinematic universes are not easy, folks.
[23] Those movies: The Secret Life of Pets, Zootopia, and Sing in 2016, Inside Out in 2015, and Frozen and Gravity in 2013. That’s it. And as of this writing in August 2019, Us is seventh in domestic earnings for the year. It’s the only original in the top ten.