On May 4, 2012, comic fans and geeks will hit the motherlode with The Avengers, which brings together Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk, Captain America, Hawkeye, Loki, Black Widow, and Nick Fury.
As we reported previously on TG, when a friend saw the advance poster of Mark Ruffalo as The Hulk, he couldn’t help but geek out: “That truly looks kickass, not to sound like a 13 year old!”
In addition to creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, Joss Whedon is a big Marvel fan, and now he’s the big cheese in charge of his own superhero flick.
He wasn’t happy working on X-Men and only two of his lines kept in the film, the best and worst lines in the film funny enough, Wolverine’s “You’re a d*ck” moment, and Storm’s “You know what happens to a toad that’s struck by lightning” scene.
Now if the film succeeds or fails, it’s on Whedon’s shoulders, but being a true Marvel fan, and with this line up of heros and stars, The Avengers definitely’s got a good shot.
Of course, you have to get the top quality pictures and behind the scenes info from the film out in the world before the geeks leak ’em, and Entertainment Weekly did a big cover story covering The Avengers.
As Moviefone joked, “If blurry set photos and hand-drawn production art didn’t get your ‘Avengers’ juices flowing, perhaps this might…”
Whedon’s done script doctor work, and according to EW, he did some writing on the script for Captain America, and as comic fans know, he also wrote issues of The Astonishing X-Men.
You get the impression Whedon is nervous at the helm of such a big franchise, telling the magazine, “There is a weird element [as] they handed me one of the biggest movies of all time, and I’m making it up as I go.”
(As EW reports, The Avengers just wrapped, and cost $220 million.)
Meanwhile, Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Hemsworth seemed happy they didn’t have to carry the whole movie themselves. “It ends up being a back-and-forth ball game between seven or eight people, instead of a two-hander, which is very intimate,” Hemsworth said. “You don’t want to drop the ball for the rest of the team.”
And as reported in the L.A. Times, Whedon told fans at Comic-Con, “What I find is that these characters mesh through these differences really well. What I also find is these actors have a great time playing against each other, and they are, as a troupe, actually a much better team than the Avengers are.”
Right as I finished writing this article, the news also broke on Moviefone and TheWrap that the first footage from the Avengers will screen on October at New York Comic Con 15 with Chris Evans, Tom Hiddleston, who plays Loki, and Clark Gregg, who plays Agent Coulson.
Be prepared for the geek blog-o-sphere to explode then, and of course, again on May 4, when the movie is finally unleashed on the world.
