It’s a big week for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as the first week of May usually is. Thunderbolts*, the newest entry in the film series, is opening in theaters everywhere just as next year’s summer-kickoff blockbuster-in-waiting Avengers: Doomsday officially begins production. But there’s a less-heralded milestone being hit on May 1st, 2025, too, also related to the matter of Marvel’s beloved super-teams: Avengers: Age of Ultron turns 10 years old.
This may go largely unrecognized even by the anniversary-industrial complex because Age of Ultron was the last time that the aforementioned Avengers were actually a little less than beloved. There have been Marvel disappointments since then, of course, and even a couple of actual flops. But The Avengers instantly became Marvel’s crown jewel upon its massively successful 2012 release, and later sequels Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame set new standards (and, honestly, ridiculous expectations) for future superhero blockbusters. Age of Ultron, on the other hand, was pretty much just a movie.
A sequel movie, at that; the film opened not quite as huge as The Avengers, and grossed significantly less. It was still a very big hit, but it was overshadowed slightly by the runaway success of Jurassic World later in the summer, just as The Avengers had somewhat overshadowed the very big hit The Dark Knight Rises back in 2012. Marvel was also growing enough to overshadow itself; a year later, Captain America: Civil War positioned itself as a de facto Avengers sequel, and made nearly as much as Age of Ultron in the process. For that matter, Iron Man 3 made nearly as much the summer before, making this Joss Whedon-directed sequel the only Avengers movie not to reach the upper-most reaches of Marvel’s box office records. In terms of audiences, the film’s reputation has, if anything, soured further over the past decade.
So what went wrong with Ultron?
Actually, very little. Marvel has gone way more wrong since then. There are hints of later problems in the behind-the-scenes stories on Ultron, specifically that the Kevin Feige brain trust wasn’t convinced that Whedon’s center section of the film, where the Avengers – that’s still Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Hulk, and Thor, rather than every superhero in the unknown universe – regroup at Hawkeye’s family farmhouse after a major defeat, needed to be in there. At the same time, producers absolutely insisted that a sequel-teasing sequence where Thor goes into a cave and has visions of the Infinity Stones was a vital undertaking. Whedon ultimately made a trade, including the cave sequence as a bargaining chip to keep the farmhouse sequence intact; unsurprisingly, the cave thing is the worst bit in the movie and, as a bonus, explains next to nothing about the infinity stones that couldn’t be fit into a dopey mid-credits scene, or another movie entirely. (Actually, it explains next to nothing about the Infinity Stones, full stop.)
And to be fair, Whedon has since revealed to be, at best, a lousy boss, and likely much worse as a harassing, power-tripping, abusive presence, though those complaints were surfaced about experiences on Justice League and the Buffy TV shows more than any of his Marvel projects. Regardless, it’s fine that Joss Whedon isn’t making Avengers movies anymore. The problem is, neither is Marvel – at least not like this.
Because beyond personal feelings about Whedon, Age of Ultron is an Avengers movie that, even more than its beloved predecessor, has clear and unmistakable authorship. This comes through in more superficial elements of the movie’s writing and direction, like its smart-alecky banter and Whedon’s love of living-splash-page digitally stitched oners that careen around the Avengers as they all do battle with a battalion of foes, which are theoretically easy to imitate (although the amount of MCU jokes that feel like the result of a lazy, last-minute punch-up, as opposed to a particular tone of comic dialogue, is certainly notable). But Whedon’s sensibility has broader thematic applications, too, steering these characters in reflective and affecting places, the way a good sequel should. As with Buffy, Whedon is interested in the psychological toil superheroism can take on a human brain, and how it affects their worldview in the long run. So the dark paranoia of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, a sort of savior complex reimagined as tech-bro insecurity, comes to the surface here, as does the sad-monster anguish of Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner and his near-miss relationship with Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow.
That romance caught some flak at the time (and since) for its seeming randomness, and specifically for a scene where Natasha confesses that her “graduation” ceremony as part of the Black Widow program involved her getting forcibly sterilized, to make her a better killer, asking the sometime Hulk if he still thinks he’s the only monster on the team. The movie, the thinking went, is equating a woman unable to bear children with monstrousness. But in a movie whose villain is a sentient robot who thinks killing humans will save the Earth (and might not be entirely wrong about this), it does make some sense to have Black Widow feel monstrous not necessarily because she can’t be a mom, but because of the parts of herself she’s had to shut off in order to make herself a more efficient killing machine. (It’s also not what the movie is saying about Black Widow. It’s what she’s saying about herself.)
And anyway, is there a single moment in Avengers: Infinity War that dares to get so potentially thorny? For that matter, how does Avengers: Endgame treat Black Widow? (Hint: She does not appear in any Marvel movies set after the events of Endgame.) Those Avengers sequels move the characters around like chess pieces on a supersized board that necessitates a lot of extra moves before reaching inevitable conclusions. Age of Ultron lets its superheroes and the business of saving the world feel genuinely messy; even Ultron, that bad robot voiced by James Spader, is sloppy and unstable in fascinating, funny ways that the tidy, debate-me-bro “logic” of the Thanos-snap thing could never touch, because the movie takes it so credulously.
Most importantly, though, is the amount of time Age of Ultron dedicates to its characters, even with the six core Avengers joined by siblings Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and eventually Vision (Paul Bettany), threatening to overstuff the proceedings. Whedon has such a deft hand at this stuff that he can sometimes actually deliver characterization through action, as in the spectacular opening battle. But he’s also confident enough to not couch everything in pew-pew-pew; an extended party scene brings in cameos from War Machine (Don Cheadle) and Falcon (Anthony Mackie) organically and hilariously, alongside the Avengers themselves revealing their own hang-ups and insecurities in lighter, riffier ways that recall the best of the Iron Man movies that made these things possible. Later, a series of nightmare visions provide visual insight into Cap, Tony, and Black Widow. The farmhouse sequence must have rankled execs because it’s almost all dialogue and blocking, not superhero spectacle. Even Ultron’s big faceoff with Vision is conveyed mostly through dialogue, before his demise is shown at a distance. And yeah, when the movie returns to action stuff, that’s fun too, with a stronger sense of geography in its Iron Man-versus-Hulk fight or Cap-and-Widow-versus-a-truck siege than in so many other laser-blasted Marvel sequels. Part of the reason the Infinity Stone teasing clangs so noisily in this movie is that it doesn’t feel especially compatible with what the movie is trying to do: actually develop the Avengers as a dysfunctional but loving group, rather than usher them into a greater cosmic adventure.
Still, the movie does seem aware that it could be a last hurrah for this group of Avengers, especially revisited a decade on; it ends with Cap and Natasha leading a pretty different lineup of heroes (who get all of 20 minutes as an on-screen team before Civil War splits them apart), as the OG group again goes their separate ways. They received a curtain call of sorts in the post-snap storyline of Endgame, which happened to reduce the superhero population down to focus on the original core six, and for its first hour and change felt character-based again. But fans seemed most besotted by Infinity War, or by Endgame’s portal-happy battle royale, where “Avengers” becomes a vague concept standing in for Marvel heroes in general, and that seems like the idea for next year’s Doomsday. Ten years ago, Age of Ultron didn’t just capture Marvel before they were officially Too Big to Fail; it also caught these characters in a snapshot before the series’ unwieldiness rendered them Too Big to Succeed.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.
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