Movie · Phase 1

The Avengers

2012 · 143 min

Loki arrives on Earth with a Chitauri army on loan and a spear that turns people into instruments, and steals the Tesseract out of a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility. Fury responds by activating a contingency…

The Infinity SagaDisney+91%Released
The Avengers poster art

The story

Loki arrives on Earth with a Chitauri army on loan and a spear that turns people into instruments, and steals the Tesseract out of a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility. Fury responds by activating a contingency he was told to shelve.

Most of the film is six difficult people failing to be a team on a flying aircraft carrier, and it works because Whedon lets them lose — Coulson dies, the Helicarrier falls, the Hulk goes off in the wrong direction. Then a hole opens over Manhattan and the movie delivers the shot the whole experiment had been building toward.

Key facts

Release date
4 May 2012
Status
Released
Phase
Phase 1
Saga
The Infinity Saga
Runtime
143 min
Certificate
PG-13
Director
Joss Whedon
Writers
Joss Whedon, Zak Penn
Streaming
Disney+
Timeline placement
2012 — the Battle of New York, roughly a year after Thor and Captain America's revival

Cast

ActorRole
Robert Downey Jr.Tony Stark / Iron Man
Chris EvansSteve Rogers / Captain America
Mark RuffaloBruce Banner / Hulk
Chris HemsworthThor
Scarlett JohanssonNatasha Romanoff / Black Widow
Jeremy RennerClint Barton / Hawkeye
Tom HiddlestonLoki
Samuel L. JacksonNick Fury

Characters

Hulk poster art

Hulk

Robert Bruce Banner

Easter eggs

  • The mid-credits scene reveals Thanos for the first time, played by Damion Poitier, grinning at the words 'to challenge them is to court death'.
  • The post-credits shawarma tag was shot after the film's premiere and added to prints days before wide release.
  • Stan Lee cameos in a news montage as an old man playing chess who scoffs, 'superheroes in New York? Give me a break.'
  • Selvig's whiteboard carries the names Foster and Selvig plus dark-energy equations that Thor: The Dark World later ties to the Convergence.
  • The Chitauri are borrowed from the Ultimates comics rather than the mainline Skrulls, a rights-adjacent workaround Marvel used for years.
  • Stark Tower's exterior signage loses everything but the 'A' during the battle, forming the Avengers Tower logo.
  • Coulson's Captain America trading cards are 'vintage, slightly foxed' — and Fury admits in a deleted line they were pulled from his locker after he died.
  • Loki's scepter is the Mind Stone in disguise, which is not revealed for another three years in Age of Ultron.

Trivia

  • Zak Penn wrote the first draft; Joss Whedon rewrote it substantially and received sole screenplay credit.
  • Mark Ruffalo replaced Edward Norton and became the first actor to both voice and motion-capture the Hulk, performing Banner and Hulk himself.
  • The final battle was shot largely in Cleveland, with East 9th Street standing in for Park Avenue.
  • Robert Downey Jr. shot the shawarma scene with a facial injury, which is why he is largely turned away from camera.
  • It became the third film in history to pass $1.5 billion, and held the third-highest global gross for years.
  • Cobie Smulders was cast as Maria Hill from a shortlist Whedon assembled personally; it was her first major film role.
  • Alan Silvestri's Avengers theme was written to be modular so it could be layered under six different characters' cues.

Box office

Budget
$220 million
Worldwide
$1.520 billion
Domestic
$623.4 million

Reviews

Critics

91%

Thanks to a script that emphasises its heroes' humanity and a wealth of superb set pieces, The Avengers lives up to its hype and raises the bar for Marvel at the movies.

The MarvelGossips verdict

The one that proved the whole model worked, and it still plays. Whedon's real trick is structural: he spends two acts on friction so the third act's team shot lands as relief rather than spectacle. The Chitauri remain the blandest army in the MCU, and it does not matter one bit.

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Frequently asked

Is this Thanos' first appearance?
Yes. The mid-credits scene is Thanos' MCU debut, played by Damion Poitier rather than Josh Brolin, who took over from Guardians of the Galaxy onward.
Was Loki's scepter an Infinity Stone?
Yes, though the film never says so. Avengers: Age of Ultron reveals the gem in the scepter is the Mind Stone, which Thanos had given Loki along with the Chitauri army.
Why is the Hulk controllable at the end?
The film deliberately leaves it ambiguous, with Banner saying he was 'always angry'. Later films establish an uneasy negotiation between the two that isn't resolved until Endgame's Smart Hulk.
Did the shawarma scene exist in the finished film at the premiere?
No. Whedon shot it after the Los Angeles premiere and Marvel added it to prints before the wide release, so early screening audiences never saw it.
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