On Saturday Morning at the D23 Expo, Disney wanted to make sure the studio panel went out with a bang. What better way than to close with the ultimate superhero crossover, ‘The Avengers‘?
Kevin Feige took the stage to talk a bit about how far their studio has come since 2007, when they started production on their first two films, ‘Iron Man’ and ‘The Incredible Hulk‘. We were then treated to a compilation of footage that spanned all the Marvel Studios films, showing us how much the Marvel Universe has grown. We were shown shots of ‘Iron Man’, ‘The Incredible Hulk’, ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘Thor’, and ‘Captain America‘, with a few new shots from ‘The Avengers’ thrown in for good measure. It was then we were shown the new footage from ‘The Avengers’! I didn’t have a recorder, so much of this is from memory.
The clip started with Loki being locked in a rather large, glass cage, that looks like a prison. Nick Fury walks in and tells Loki, “In case it’s unclear, if you try to escape, you even scratch on the glass, it’s 30,000 feet straight down.” The floor below him opens, revealing we’re thousands of feet up in the air on the SHIELD Hellacarrier. Loki, provoking Fury, teases “It’s an impressive cage, but one I don’t think that was made for me. But for a beast pretending to be human.” He then challenges Fury by asking how desperate he was to put together this team. Fury quickly retorts, saying “You have brought my world to the brink of war. You kill because it’s fun, so you made me very desperate.” Loki begins taunting Fury, informing him he was so close to true power. He had the tesseract (Cosmic Cube) and but now will remind Fury what real power is. Fury begins to walk away from Loki, telling Loki, “Tell me if real power wants a magazine.”
Loki then begins a long speech, with many of the Avengers members sitting around a table, watching it on monitors. We see Captain America, Black Widow, Thor, Maria Hill, and Bruce Banner all listening intently as Loki tries to provoke them. The monitor shuts off and Banner looks up, smiling and says “He really grows on you, doesn’t he?” We then cut to Nick Fury explaining that he put together this team of extraordinary people to fight the battles that he couldn’t. Finally, the footage ended with Tony Stark behind a bar and he says, “Let’s do a head count. We’ve got two deadly assassins,” and we cut to Black Widow and Hawkeye on a bridge next to a crashed car. “A demi god,” Thor looks up menacingly, then we see him jumping at Captain America, his hammer swinging at him. “A legend that actually lives up to the legend,” and we see Captain America looking at his new suit in a case, and then we see him jumping away from an explosion. Stark ends then ends with “and somehow you managed to piss them all off.” We then realize, Stark is talking to Loki, who says, “I have an army.” Stark looks at him sternly and retorts “We have a Hulk.” We ended seeing a transforming leg and the new Hulk menacingly screaming into the camera.
Feige then introduced the cast of ‘The Avengers’, and brought them out on stage, minus Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, and Mark Ruffalo, who we’re still shooting the movie in Cleveland. The cast, from left to right above, included Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Cobie Smulders, and Tom Hiddelston, with Studio head Kevin Feige. Downey, Jr.’s presence made the arena explode, and he received a huge standing ovation. He then asked if we wanted to see it again and they played the footage for us again.
The footage was really, really fun and it looks like Marvel pulled out all the stops for their epic crossover movie. As a huge fan of the comics, I was getting serious chills seeing all these characters on screen together. They seemed to have hit the perfect balance between action and dialogue, which is very important. You don’t want a movie of this size to be boring, and it definitely looks anything but boring. The thing that really got to me, and I talked to others that agreed, is that it wasn’t the scope that made the movie feel so big, but the sense of urgency to it. It seems with the world being on the brink of war and Loki causing all sorts of problems, having to a assemble a team of heroes to deal with it, just made it seem big. And fun. The most important thing was how fun this looked. It just seeped with witty dialogue, fun action, and looks to be the biggest summer movie of next year.
May 4, 2012 can’t get here soon enough. ‘The Avengers’ really does look to live up to all the pre-setup hype surrounding it. It really is my most anticipated movie of next year, and the footage we saw this weekend just amplified my excitement. I can’t wait to see it.
