In terms of box office performance, critical reactions and fan response, Avengers: Age of Ultron is at the bottom of the pile when it comes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s all-star ensemble movies, a sentiment that a large number of fans probably wouldn’t argue with.
It isn’t a terrible movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a step down from the giddy highs of its predecessor, and it sank deeper and deeper into MCU formula as the story progressed. The plot, character and action beats were all too familiar, which may have had something to do with the fact it took Joss Whedon less than an hour to come up with the story.
New book The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe via CBR reveals that the writer and director got the call to helm the project that would eventually become Age of Ultron, and 45 minutes later he’d already mapped out the broad strokes of the narrative and how it would all tie together.
“My agent texted me: ‘Do you want to direct Avengers 2?’. I texted back saying, ‘Let’s do this.’ I couldn’t shut the ideas up. Reopened, they just flooded in. I thought I never wanted to do this again. Honestly. It was a very tough process.”
A 76% score and 83% user rating on Rotten Tomatoes coupled with a box office haul of $1.4 billion is a phenomenal success by any other metric, but that doesn’t prevent Avengers: Age of Ultron from being the worst-performing of the quartet by all of those measuring sticks, even if it does provide solid superhero entertainment.
