This weekend’s big event at NYCC was definitely The Avengers panel in which Kevin Feige (President of Marvel Studios), Chris Evans (Captain America), Clark Gregg (Agent Coulson), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Cobie Smulders (Maria Hill) and surprise guest Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner) took the stage to show off the massive film. While the panel members were mostly tight lipped on almost every subject a few interesting topics did come up and we got an exclusive look at a pretty great scene from the film.
I’ll describe the scene below so I avoid spoiling anything, but what was most exciting about the panel was how excited everyone was about the movie and how far Feige wants to movie forward with the series. I think we all knew that a plethora of more Marvel hero films were coming along with sequels, but Feige was pretty much confirming over and over that we’d be seeing a second Avengers and that the individual hero films were going to continue to build around the franchise. He said that Ron Man 3 would be the first film in what they’re dubbing Phase 2 and will hopefully lead to Avengers 2 eventually.
Also of note was the fact that Feige pretty much confirmed we’d get an after credits sequence in The Avengers as well. Aside from those tidbits the cast mostly discussed how well they all got along, how awesome they all are, how amazing Joss Whedon is as a director and Hiddleston laid some serious Loki knowledge smackdown. Seriously, most of the audience questions from the ladies were directed at him and he pulled out some serious comic book/Norse mythology knowledge to answer the questions. Quite impressive.
As for the clip we saw it made me really and truly excited for the movie, which is especially impressive because I wasn’t as excited as I thought I would be after the trailer. Why did it get me so excited? Because it wasn’t an action sequence and it was still amazing. The scene involved Bruce Banner and the Black Widow (Scarlet Johannsen) talking after Banner was tricked into following a little girl into a home on the outside of town. Widow had just tracked Banner down (well, they’d always been keeping tabs on him evidently) in what looked like India and was there to bring him in for S.H.I.E.L.D. Of course Banner was quite dubious of the reason for them to bring him in, thinking that they simply wanted the monster inside him.
It ran about two minutes and didn’t feature any action except for the drawing of one gun, but the play between Banner and Black Widow was fantastic and there’s a moment when Banner gets a little angry and it worked so amazingly well. The scene just built fantastically and you could actually feel the fear behind Black Widow as she thought the Hulk was about to jump out at her. I was never in doubt that the action in Avengers was going to be at least solid, but from this clip it looks like the drama is going to be fantastic too and that’s where the best superhero movies really shine. As any comic nerd will tell you, the action is great but the reason you get drawn in is because the characters are so great. From the clip I saw it looks like Whedon and company really get that. Hopefully it lasts throughout the entire film.
