Avengers: Age of Ultron

• 1. Introduction

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  Avengers: Age of Ultron arrived on the 1st of May 2015, carrying a price tag that few films in history had matched: a net production budget of $365 million. That figure, drawn from an actual gross spend of $444 million partially offset by UK tax payments, placed it among the most expensive films ever made. But the budget alone does not explain why this movie generated $392.5 million in its opening weekend worldwide, why it smashed IMAX records, or why it drew fierce debates about what blockbuster filmmaking was becoming.

  At the center of those debates sat a single question: what happens when the weapon you build to protect the world decides that the world itself is the problem? That is the moral trap Tony Stark walks into when he and Bruce Banner quietly activate an artificial intelligence they find hidden inside Loki's scepter. The result is Ultron, and Ultron has plans.

  This is also a film about a director caught between creative instincts and franchise machinery, about a cast of nearly twenty major actors who barely fit in the same room, and about a production that stretched from a ship-breaking yard in Bangladesh to a medieval fortress in Italy. Ultron's story turns out to be the smallest story Age of Ultron has to tell.

• 2. Building Ultron

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  James Spader was Joss Whedon's first and only choice to voice the villain. Whedon cited his voice as something "hypnotic" that could be "eerily calm and compelling" while also carrying genuine humor. That combination mattered because Whedon had a very specific idea of what Ultron should not be: a standard robot.

  Whedon described the character as "a robot who's genuinely disturbed" and compared him explicitly to Frankenstein's monster. He told interviewers, "We create something in our own image and the thing turns on us. It has that pain of 'Well, why was I made? I want to kill Daddy.'" Spader himself called Ultron "a very dangerous child" with too much power, too much speed, and no internal censorship whatsoever.

  To bring that performance to the screen, Extensive body and head scans were taken of Spader before production began. Marvel president Kevin Feige was explicit that they did not hire Spader to deliver a robot voice. Industrial Light & Magic developed an entirely new motion capture system for the film called Muse, designed specifically to capture an actor's full performance more faithfully than existing systems and to combine different takes. Mark Ruffalo, who went through the same motion capture process for the Hulk, described the advancing technology as "more of a collaboration," noting that performers were no longer constrained by their physical age, weight, or size.

  Ultron's origin story was also redesigned from the ground up. In the original Marvel Comics, the character was created by scientist Hank Pym. Whedon changed this because Pym was already tied to Edgar Wright's in-development Ant-Man project. Whedon also felt that introducing a third scientist into the Avengers lineup just to create Ultron would make little narrative sense when Tony Stark and Bruce Banner were already on the team. Whedon wanted the villain to emerge from the Avengers themselves.

• 3. The Maximoff Question

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  Pietro and Wanda Maximoff were the two characters Whedon most wanted in the film, and getting them there required navigating a genuine legal tangle. Marvel Studios shared the film rights to Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch with 20th Century Fox because the twins had long histories as mutants in the X-Men comics. Fox had already used Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, in X-Men: Days of Future Past, released in 2014.

  To sidestep the mutant question entirely, Whedon stripped the twins of their comics origin and recast them as Sokovia residents who had volunteered for experimentation under the Hydra commander Baron von Strucker using Loki's scepter. Aaron Taylor-Johnson was cast as Pietro and Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda. Taylor-Johnson had been in negotiations since June 2013; Olsen's casting was first reported in August of that year, with Marvel confirming both in November.

  Olsen's preparation for the role was unconventional. Whedon told her he had been inspired by dancers in thinking about how Wanda's power would look visually. Olsen trained primarily with a dancer rather than through traditional stunt work. She described Wanda not as mentally unstable but as "overly stimulated," someone who can connect to parallel worlds and parallel times simultaneously and has never been taught to control the ability.

  Taylor-Johnson said Pietro's running style went through many design iterations. Most of his scenes were filmed outdoors deliberately, to give physical life to the movement. For audience members watching, the production used an ultra-high-speed camera to capture how the world looks to Quicksilver, then combined that footage with shots of Taylor-Johnson moving through the same environment at normal speed.

• 4. A Production Across Continents

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  Filming began on the 11th of February 2014, in Johannesburg, South Africa, one day later than originally scheduled. Second unit crews spent two weeks in the Central Business District shooting background plates for the Hulk rampage sequence without the main cast present.

  By mid-March, principal photography had shifted to Shepperton Studios near London, working under the production alias "After Party." Production designer Charles Wood built what the production described as one of the largest sets ever constructed for a Marvel film: an enormous Avengers Tower interior with multiple connected environments and levels. Filming in England continued through August, with additional locations including Hawley Woods in Hampshire, the University of East Anglia in Norwich, Dover Castle in Kent (standing in for Strucker's Hydra base), and a Metropolitan Police training facility that doubled as a Sokovia city street.

  Italy was next. On March 22, the production moved to Fort Bard in the Aosta Valley region, filming through March 28 in a landscape that crews transformed into fictional Eastern Europe by replacing local storefronts with Cyrillic script. The towns of Aosta, Bard, Donnas, Pont-Saint-Martin, and Verres all appeared in the frame.

  In South Korea, filming ran from March 30 through April 14 across Seoul locations including the Mapo Bridge, Cheongdam Bridge, Digital Media City, and the Gangnam District. An artificial island on the Han River called the Saebit Dungdungseom served as an IT institute headquarters. The production attached cameras to drones and race cars to get footage that would have been impossible to capture by conventional means. South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism reimbursed up to thirty percent of the studio's local expenditures under a state incentive program. Additional shooting took place in Chittagong, Bangladesh, including the Chittagong Ship Breaking Yard, and in the state of New York. Whedon announced the completion of principal photography on Twitter on the 6th of August 2014.

• 5. The Scenes That Didn't Survive

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  Tom Hiddleston was cast to reprise his role as Loki after principal photography wrapped, but his scenes were cut entirely from the theatrical release. The reason was audience response: test screenings showed that viewers were placing so much weight on Loki's appearance that they began to believe he was controlling Ultron, which "was actually imbalancing people's expectations," Hiddleston later explained.

  The film's other major structural casualty was a much longer sequence featuring Thor and Erik Selvig in a cave. The original version involved Thor being possessed by a Norn, described in the source material as a goddess of destiny, while Selvig questioned her about Thor's hallucination. Test audiences did not respond to it, and the scene was shortened significantly.

  Captain Marvel came close to appearing in the film. Whedon went so far as to shoot visual effects plates of her flying into Avengers Headquarters at the film's conclusion. The shots were ultimately reused with Wanda Maximoff substituted in, because the actress for Captain Marvel had not yet been signed. Kevin Feige explained that they didn't want to introduce her "fully formed flying in a costume before you knew who she was or how she came to be." An early script draft had also placed Hulk's Quinjet near Saturn at the film's end, but the creative team pulled back to avoid fueling rumors about a Planet Hulk adaptation, which Marvel had no plans to pursue at that point. Thor: Ragnarok, released in 2017, eventually revealed that the Hulk did leave Earth after Age of Ultron's events.

  Whedon was also in conflict with Marvel executives during post-production. The executives were not enthusiastic about two extended sections: the scenes at Clint Barton's farmhouse and the hallucination sequences Wanda inflicts on the Avengers. Both survived into the final cut, though Whedon acknowledged the tension publicly. He chose not to release a director's cut, stating in July 2015 that he was satisfied with the theatrical version and did not believe it needed further adjustment.

• 6. Records and Reception

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  On the 15th of May 2015, Age of Ultron became the twenty-first film in cinema history to cross one billion dollars at the worldwide box office. It was also the third Marvel Studios film and the eighth Disney-distributed film to reach that threshold. Its final worldwide gross settled at $1.403 billion.

  The domestic opening weekend earned $191.3 million, placing it third behind Jurassic World and The Avengers. Its opening day total of $84.46 million was the largest single opening day for a superhero film at that time, though it finished second overall behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2's $91.7 million. Some analysts attributed the slightly softer-than-expected opening to competition from the boxing match between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao that same weekend.

  Internationally, the film set an IMAX opening-weekend record with $25.2 million, surpassing The Dark Knight Rises. South Korea was the top-earning international market for the opening weekend, generating $28.2 million. Advance ticket sales there had accounted for 96 percent of all reserved seats, breaking a record previously held by Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The UK earned $27.3 million in its opening weekend, setting a record for a superhero film in that territory.

  Critics gave the film generally positive but qualified notices. Rotten Tomatoes described it as "overstuffed but mostly satisfying." Metacritic's score of 66 out of 100, based on 49 critics, indicated "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences were more enthusiastic: CinemaScore gave it an "A" and PostTrak showed a 90 percent positive overall score. Deadline Hollywood calculated the film's net profit at $382.32 million after accounting for all production, marketing, and distribution costs, placing it fourth on their list of 2015's most valuable blockbusters.

• 7. The Trailer That Leaked

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  Marvel had planned to premiere the first trailer for Age of Ultron during an the 28th of October 2014, episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Six days before that broadcast, on October 22, the trailer leaked online. Within hours, Marvel abandoned its original plan and released the trailer officially on YouTube.

  The trailer centered on a slowed, distorted version of "I've Got No Strings" from the 1940 Disney film Pinocchio, with James Spader's voice as Ultron playing over images of a battered Avengers team. Entertainment Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter both noted the effectiveness of that music choice. The trailer collected 34.3 million global views within its first 24 hours, of which 26.2 million came from Marvel's YouTube channel. That figure broke the previous record held by the Iron Man 3 trailer, which had drawn 23.14 million views. The original Avengers teaser had received 20.4 million views in its first 24 hours.

  Marvels response to the leak was to honor its original commitment: it aired footage from Age of Ultron during the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode that had been scheduled to debut the trailer. A second trailer premiered on the 12th of January 2015, during ESPN's broadcast of the College Football Playoff National Championship. A final trailer was released on the 5th of March 2015, after fans unlocked it through Twitter hashtag activity on March 4. Within a week, Marvel reported that final trailer had received over 35 million views.

• 8. What Followed

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  Age of Ultron introduced Vision, played by Paul Bettany, who had previously voiced the AI J.A.R.V.I.S. across multiple MCU films. Bettany noted that being asked to play a second MCU character was unusual because the franchise almost never recasts an actor in a new role. His physical transformation required two hours of makeup application, combining face paint and prosthetics whose exact skin hue was described by makeup artists Jeremy Woodhead and Nik Williams as the hardest element to determine. The prosthetics were ultimately replaced with CGI elements in post-production.

  The film closed with a mid-credits scene showing Thanos retrieving what appears to be a gauntlet and declaring he will collect the Infinity Stones himself, the first concrete step toward the storyline that would define Avengers: Infinity War in 2018 and Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Josh Brolin appeared in this scene uncredited.

  The final roster assembled by Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff for the new Avengers team included James Rhodes, Vision, Sam Wilson, and Wanda Maximoff. Anthony Mackie, who played Wilson, said he did not realize his character had become an Avenger until he watched the premiere cut of the film, having only been given the script pages for his own scenes during production. The Falcon's suit visible in that final scene was actually the version designed for the Ant-Man film, which had not yet been released; Kevin Feige decided to reshoot the sequence to incorporate it.