The Playlist

Puny God: What Worked & What Didn't In 'The Avengers'

By Oliver Lyttelton
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May 7, 2012 10:57 AM
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89 Comments

Features

Given that it made a record-breaking $200 million over the weekend, and has made two-thirds of a billion dollars worldwide in just over ten days, it seems safe to assume that you've seen "The Avengers" by now. And given that the film received a rarer-than-unicorns A+ CinemaScore from audiences, we assume that you enjoyed it. And rightly so. Not one, but two of our reviews agree that it's one of the best comic book movies to date, and one of the more satisfying summer blockbusters in many moons.

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Joss Whedon Says 'The Avengers' DVD/Blu-Ray Will Have 30 Minutes Of Deleted Scenes

By Joe Cunningham
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May 7, 2012 9:38 AM
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4 Comments

News

We shouldn't really be surprised by this, given that it's Joss Whedon we're dealing with, but it looks like that when it comes to "The Avengers" it seems like there's no end to the awesomeness in sight. Whedon delivered a kick-ass five-star blockbuster to an international crowd, and stepped things up a notch further by adding a second post-credits sting to the version that played to North American audiences this weekend. $200 million record breaking dollars later and he's still not done, with Whedon dropping some hints to Collider about what may turn up on what's now the most anticipated DVD/Blu-ray of the year.

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Weekend Box Office: 'The Avengers' Assemble The Biggest Opening Weekend In History With $207 Million

By Gabe Toro
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May 6, 2012 11:50 AM
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17 Comments

Box Office

Box office: you just got Avenged. Combining the feature attractions of four separate blockbusters, "The Avengers" was looking to at least surpass the first weekend gross of "Iron Man 2," which pulled in a non-3D three-day total of $128 million during this weekend two years ago. However, few expected the team-up film to approach the final domestic tallies of both "Thor" and "Captain America: The First Avenger," roughing up previous weekend record-holder "Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part Two." That 3D-enhanced final installment of the "Potter" series still holds the record for the biggest opening day at $91 million, but "The Avengers"' $80 million Friday wasn't as frontloaded, and the film will finish Sunday at the top of the blockbuster opening weekend summit. Hooray money!

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Joss Whedon's Batman, How Black Widow Nearly Got The Axe & 15 More Revelations From 'The Avengers' Press Tour

By Oliver Lyttelton
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May 4, 2012 12:00 PM
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5 Comments

Features

If it's somehow escaped your notice, "The Avengers" is in theaters today. One of the biggest gambles in blockbuster history, it looks to have paid off: the reviews have been hugely positive, it's already closing on $300 million from the international box office, and stands to break records over this weekend in the U.S. too.

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Discuss: After 'The Hunger Games' & 'The Dark Knight Rises,' Does Less Mean More When It Comes To Movie Marketing?

By Oliver Lyttelton
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May 3, 2012 10:56 AM
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8 Comments

Features

The creator of "Lost" might have a horse in this fight (he's the co-writer of Ridley Scott's "Prometheus"), but he also has a point. In the last few months, marketing of major blockbusters seems to fall into two separate categories: keeping your cards close to the chest (the J.J. Abrams mystery box approach), or the show-absolutely-everything technique, bombarding fans with character posters, different trailers and enough clips and stills that you could essentially reconstruct the movie, with a basic understanding of narrative structure and a copy of iMovie.

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Joss Whedon Reveals He Tossed Out & Rewrote Zak Penn's Original 'Avengers' Script

By Kevin Jagernauth
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May 2, 2012 3:04 PM
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11 Comments

News

By any standard -- critical or commercial -- not only is "The Avengers" a megahit, which by the end of this weekend could be looking at $585 million worldwide, it's also considered by many to be the best Marvel movie to date. And when the dust clears and the money is counted, Marvel and the fans will have one person to thank: Joss Whedon. While it seems like a no brainer to give the fanboy favorite Whedon the keys to their biggest movie to date, Marvel was taking a bit of a risk. For Whedon, it was his first venture with an expensive, tentpole movie with a lot riding on it, but not only did Marvel have faith he could pull it off, they let him write the damn thing too. But it could have turned out much differently.

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First Footage From Joss Whedon's 'Much Ado About Nothing' Debuts; 'Cabin In The Woods' Goes Direct-to-Video In Australia & New Zealand

By Drew Taylor
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April 30, 2012 11:35 AM
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6 Comments

News

On yesterday's "Sunday Morning" show on CBS, in a feature about "Avengers" writer/director/super-geek Joss Whedon the first footage from "Much Ado About Nothing," his micro-budgeted Shakespeare adaptation that he shot in a two week window during post-production on "The Avengers," debuted. And it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect (with one new aspect – more on that in a minute) – the small scale antidote to his superhero romp, which is poised to be the summer's first bona fide blockbuster (and with good reason – it rules). But things aren't so happy everywhere in Whedonville, as his recent horror movie Rubik's Cube "Cabin in the Woods" is getting an inglorious debut in other parts of the world.

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Review: 'The Avengers' Has Its Issues, But Mostly Delivers Thrilling, Engaging, Blockbuster Fun

By Todd Gilchrist
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April 30, 2012 10:04 AM
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3 Comments

Reviews

Everything that works in “The Avengers” really works, but not everything works in “The Avengers.” A virtuoso collection of action set pieces framed by an uninspiring “getting the team together” narrative which should have been accomplished in all of those post-credits sequences in earlier Marvel movies, Joss Whedon’s stab at superheroes delivers plenty of what makes both him and his subject matter appealing, as well as an abundance of mythological set-up that’s somehow simultaneously redundant and contradictory. But as the best (or perhaps most consistently engaging) Marvel movie since the original “Iron Man,” “The Avengers” is a winning piece of popcorn entertainment that does better with characters in an ensemble setting than many ever did when they starred in their own vehicles.

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Review: Marvel's 'The Avengers' Is Immensely Satisfying, Entirely Thrilling & Possibly The Best Superhero Movie Yet

By Oliver Lyttelton
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April 19, 2012 7:05 PM
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33 Comments

Reviews

The first scene of " The Avengers" is not very good. Deep in a secret S.H.I.E.L.D. base, scientist Eric Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) is conducting experiments on The Tesseract, the blue cube that powered the Red Skull's experiments in "Captain America." Expriments that, unfortunately, bring to earth Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the vengeful brother of Thor (Chris Hemsworth), last seen plummeting from Asgard into oblivion. Loki manages to take down S.H.I.E.L.D's best -- Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) -- with ease, and soon the base is decimated. It's a perfectly acceptable place to start, but there's something off about the execution: it's stilted, awkward and humorless, and the action is pretty uninvolving, with a TV-level of scope.

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The Lost, Forgotten & Undersung Projects Of Joss Whedon

By Drew Taylor
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April 11, 2012 11:04 AM
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8 Comments

Features

Joss Whedon is about to have a very good week. The writer/director/producer has until recently, been best known for his work on television: he turned his poorly-received screenwriting debut "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" into one of the most beloved cult series of all times (which itself got a long-running spin-off, "Angel"), and followed them up with the short-lived but passionately followed sci-fi Western "Firefly," a show that lasted as single season, but managed to get its own cinematic sequel, "Serenity," which marked Whedon's big-screen directorial debut.

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