Seven Things We Want From The Avengers Movie
by Tom Burns

5. They're going to have to bus in some ladies.

Don't get us wrong. We don't want the Avengers to start stupidly introducing new characters into the mix just to appease certain demographics - like the idiotic addition of Tom Sawyer to the god-awful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - but any Avengers movie is going to have to work hard at not devolving into one big nerd sausage-fest. Hardcore comic geeks might disagree (stupid virgins), but Gwyneth Paltrow and Kirsten Dunst are both a big, big part of the reason why Iron Man and Spider-Man did so well at the box office. They opened the movies up to a much wider viewing audience, they imbued their respective films with a well-needed sense of charm and grace, and, most importantly, they made sure that our wives and girlfriends didn't need to be dragged to the multiplex to see a silly superhero movie. And the great thing is: the Avengers actually has a nice selection of female characters to chose from, although their relative lack of fame might make them easy to neglect in a big-budget film adaptation.

There's Janet Van Dyne, a.k.a. The Wasp, one of the founding Avengers, there's the Black Widow (sexy Russian counter-spy who works with SHIELD and appeared in the Ultimates), there's Sharon Carter (SHIELD agent and former Cap girlfriend), the Scarlet Witch - more than enough to work with. But the filmmakers are going to have to press hard to find organic ways to work the women into the main storyline, particularly since so many fanboys are just going to be chanting "More Hulk smash, more Iron Man go boom, more homo-erotic escapist male fantasy NOW!" (OK, that last one is going to be more implied than anything.)

6. The bad guys need to be turned up to eleven.

OK, Iron Man was undoubtedly awesome, but, in the end, his big arch-rival was just a slightly bigger version of himself. That's fun, but it's not epic. That's not Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. That's not Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. It's just Tony Stark and... um, taller Tony Stark. With The Avengers, if you're bringing together the world's most powerful superheroes, then you need to bring them together to fight a threat that the heroes couldn't possibly face separately. So, you can't have Iron Monger or the Abomination as the Big Bad of the Avengers movie. Not nearly big enough. The villain needs to be something of almost unprecedented scale. We're talking Ultron and a million-strong army of robots, alien invasions (either the Skrulls or the Chitauri from the Ultimates), the Masters of Evil (though having a bad-guy super-team means they need origins, which, remember, we're against), dinosaurs, rogue gods, the freakin' Happening - something HUGE. We know that Loki, Thor's half-brother and the Norse god of lies, is the villain who inspired the original founding of the Avengers, but unless the screenwriters can work Loki's manipulations into some real-world settings - like in the Ultimates, Volume 2 where Loki inspired a global community of superheroes to attack the American-based Avengers - it'll probably look pretty stupid to have a bunch of magical Vikings attacking Robert Downey Jr. and Ed Norton. But this transitions nicely into our next point...

7. If they don't have the budget, don't even bother.

Can we talk about how much the Fantastic Four movies suck? They suck really, really hardcore. Like insanely hardcore. In fact, they're the ultimate examples of how badly superhero team movies can turn out. (Probably the only example of how good they can turn out would be Bryan Singer's X2: X-Men United.) Aside from the inane scripts and bad acting, perhaps the worst sins of the FF movies are how cheap they look. Why would you greenlight a movie about a man who can stretch his body to amazing lengths and a stone goliath who can lift buildings if you don't have the budget to show either (or, at least, show it well)? There's a reason why Brad Bird's The Incredibles stands as the greatest superhero movie ever made, and that's because, thanks to its CGI animation, it could actually show you a team of superheroes using their powers on an unlimited scale, just like they do in our favorite comic books.

So, if Marvel wants to make an Avengers movie, they absolutely, positively SHOULD NOT proceed any further unless they're going to pony up enough cash to show us the Avengers in their full super-powered glory. And that means more than having an hour and half of set up and only 25 minutes of pure action. We want superpowers being shown off throughout - Iron Man flying, Thor opening portals with his mighty hammer, Hulk hulking out, Ant-Man shrinking, and so on and so forth. And we don't care how you do it, Marvel - open a theme-park in Dubai, sell Stan Lee to DC Comics, kidnap James Cameron and make him give you some of that crazy-ass technology he's developing for Avatar - but unless you're committed to showing us a full-on, in-your-face, Lord of the Rings scale, superheroic symphony of spectacle with The Avengers, don't even effing bother. We don't want any off-screen Sentinels or clouds-of-gas parading as Galactus. Prove to us that live-action heroes can look just as cool as the Incredibles, or just give up now.