Avengers, assemble! That means all of you. Now, squeeze together. C’mon Nick Fury. Get real close to Hawkeye so that you are in the shot. And Quicksilver… step away from Ultron or you’ll miss the chance to be part of the marketing for The Avengers: Age of Ultron!
The official poster for Joss Whedon’s The Avengers: Age of Ultron just landed on the movie’s Facebook page, and it’s – well, it’s more than a little crowded. And Photoshopped. Heroes like Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) look like they are striking poses used in pictures and posters for previous Marvel movies. To be fair, there are only so many ways one can draw an arrow with a bow. But still, this is a tad jumbled.
What this poster reminds us, perhaps indirectly, is that there will be a TON of characters jockeying for screen time in Joss Whedon’s upcoming, sure-to-be-massive summer blockbuster. When the Avengers last "avenged," there were six key players who needed to be brought together to bring Loki down. Because of his importance to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury now gets poster space (even though he placed himself in exile at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier). And the one-sheet makes room for the three major newcomers to the MCU: Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson); Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen); and Vision (Paul Bettany)… who Marvel STILL tries to hide behind a sun burst. I swear, the studio will do everything in its power to hide the full reveal of Bettany’s hero for as long as physically possible. Age of Ultron needs to have some secrets, dammit, and this poster isn’t going to ruin everything!
The theme of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers: Age of Ultron appears to be the tearing down of the mighty team assembled in the first Avengers movie. As Ultron (James Spader) says in the above clip, it is the villain’s intention to tear the team apart from the inside. And as Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) candidly admitted in the first movie, this isn’t exactly a well-balanced organization. They are a time bomb.
There are a lot of pieces waiting to drop for the MCU in Phase Three, which doesn’t officially begin until Captain America: Civil War in May 2016. But things will start going "boom" when Ultron smashes into theaters on May 1.
