Marvel’s The Avengers is truly one of the greatest success stories in Hollywood. Not only did it properly kickstart their cinematic universe after several standalone movies released to varying degrees of success, but to this day, it’s still one of the biggest films of all-time at the box office and remains the gold standard in team-up flicks. And it’s really a testament to the talented cast and crew that it all worked out in the end.
Aside from the challenge that comes along with making a movie with an all-star cast function as both a singular story and an opportunity to give all these individual stars and heroes their own shining moments, there was also the uncomfortable acknowledgement that the lead-in pics of Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger weren’t really all that they could be.
The magic of The Avengers though is that somehow it retroactively made those films better, smoothing over the rough edges they may have left on the franchise and putting the MCU in a much better place than it had been previously. And according to studio president Kevin Feige at least, they were always confident that their first major team-up pic would deliver.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly as part of the outlet’s ongoing Avengers: Infinity War blowout, the super producer revealed that even if Thor and The First Avenger had bombed, they were still all-in on Joss Whedon’s 2012 pic.
The real answer is we were all-in. God forbid those films had [flopped] … I think the marketing probably would have been different [for Avengers] and maybe the way the film was cut together or recut with additional scenes would have been different, but it was all-in on that one.
This is pretty interesting to hear. While nowadays a movie like The Avengers is obviously a guaranteed hit, there was a time when the project would have been classified as a pretty big gamble. Especially when Thor and The First Avenger, while not bombs, didn’t exactly light the box office on fire. Granted, Iron Man showed Marvel that there was a thirst for this kind of stuff, but going into the team-up flick, there was never any guarantee it’d be as big as a hit as it was.
Anyways, that’s all in the past now, as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the most successful and lucrative franchises in any medium, ever. And with Avengers: Infinity War set to blast into theaters later next month, the future of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is looking brighter than ever.
