Why Avengers: Age Of Ultron Has Me Worried About Infinity War

This weekend sees the release of Marvel’s next sure-fire box office success. ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ is set to crack the $1 billion box office mark with ease on its way to a position among the highest grossing movies of all time.

Its financial success is assured, as it is easy to presume will be the case with ‘Avengers: Infinity War’, parts one and two, in 2018 and 2019 – but what I want to discuss isn’t the likelihood of monetary success for the next ‘Avengers’ flick, but whether it can reach the same kind of creative success as its predecessors.

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‘Age of Ultron’ is Joss Whedon’s last film with Marvel for the foreseeable future - he’s gone, he’s out of here. The pressure of blockbuster filmmaking on such a scale has simply been far too much for him to bear this time around. A lengthy break awaits him, and in his stead the ‘Captain America’ team will step up.

‘The Winter Soldier’s Joe and Anthony Russo will direct the epic ‘Avengers’ two-parter with writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely back to work alongside them. They’re a good team – there’s proof of that - but can they take on something as simultaneously enormous and delicate as The Avengers?

Next year’s ‘Captain America: Civil War’ will be their litmus test, it will have a large cast of heroes – most of whom we imagine will be back for ‘Infinity War’, so we’ll be able to see whether they can deliver top spectacle with a script that can strike the right balance between its plentiful characters.

Striking that balance well is one of the elements that impressed us most about ‘Age of Ultron’. Joss Whedon’s script gave every single character a big moment, further explored what makes each of them tick and did so without favouring any one hero over another. It’s quite a remarkable feat, showing Whedon’s immense skill when it comes to ensemble pieces.

Asking the Russos and their writers to recapture that, and then imbue it all with a level of wit match the creator of ‘Buffy’ and ‘Firefly’ may well be asking too much.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) will be ten years old by the time ‘Infinity War – Part 1’ arrives and its whole life will have been leading to that moment. Marvel’s plan will surely be to bring together as many of the characters they have together, so all the pieces will be moved to make sure that happens in a somewhat logical fashion. Logical that is, given they’ll be fighting a mad purple alien with control of the universe in his glove.

How the MCU comes together to defeat that alien – Thanos (Josh Brolin), and his reality-controlling Infinity Gems – won’t be a problem, but managing their interactions, who has scenes with who, who fights alongside or against who and so on, will be a huge undertaking.

To then ask this team to do it all with a Whedonesque verve could well be too huge a task to bestow on anyone. Beyond even that there’s the fact that the ‘Infinity War’ team will be spinning more plates than Whedon ever did, even more dauntingly, blending all elements of the MCU to date – the fantasy, the science, the human and the alien, all in universe-altering clash.

The results will still no doubt be spectacular, but without Joss Whedon there could be a spark missing that means it simply isn’t the same.

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Picture Credit: Marvel Studios.