Blogging A to Z Day 1: Avengers

When it comes to movies, the Avengers are the talk of the town. Their first movie being the third highest grossing movie of all time leaves everyone with high hopes for the sequel. It’s the combination of a bunch of individual characters’ movies, which have also been both good and successful – but they made a combined movie that was greater than the sum of its parts.

There’s been talk as well about the fact that Marvel Studios has made a lot of what they had left, in terms of movie rights. That the big names, the popular characters, all belonged to other studios – the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Spider-Man. You look at the history of the Avengers in the comics, and maybe it’s true. The Avengers have never been one team dealing with the world’s threats. Instead, they’ve been a conglomeration of heroes, between who was popular and who needed a comic to belong to at the time.

Can you name all of these Avengers?
From Avengers (vol. 5) #24 by Jonathan Hickman

The best comparison would be DC’s Justice League, who, while having added people at times, also have a solid core team of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Aquaman, Cyborg, and Green Lantern. By and large this iconic group is the Justice League and when they announced the Justice League movies and the associated solo movies, we pretty much could have filled in the blanks for them.

When it comes to the Avengers, I could just keep throwing out names – not only the characters who have been in the movies, but characters like Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Beast. And a whole host of characters who are coming soon: Black Panther, Ant-Man and (hopefully) Wasp, Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange. And even characters so iconically part of the Avengers that Marvel Studios got the rights to them even though they are also X-Men: Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. So we’ll have them in two movie franchises, though last year’s Quicksilver is going to be a hard act to follow!

Click here for the A to Z list Art by Jeremy of Hollywood Nuts!

There are advantages to the Avengers as a team, and I think they are going to capitalize on this in coming years. Because the Avengers are an open group, constantly growing and changing and with a new roster, they will be able to add and subtract characters as needed by their storytelling, movie rights, and actor contracts. Rather than being a hindrance, all of those things can work in the larger narrative of the Avengers.

In other words, what do I think is going to happen in Avengers: Age of Ultron? Anything could happen!

This post was by @CompGeeksDavid of the Comparative Geeks and regular Sourcerer contributor. For more A to Z shenanigans, check out Comparative Geeks!