Too Many Crooks....



No, not this one.



It's now, give or take, about 270 days until the release of what will undoubtedly be, bar a very quick turnaround on Basic Instinct 3, the most anticipated flick of 2012, The Avengers.

That's 270 days for the hype machine to go even further into overdrive, to whip our collective cinematic psyche into a deeper frenzy, and 270 days for the drip feed of teasers, trailers, adverts, and press junkets to lead us dribbling towards to the box office next May.

Will it work? Of course. It takes a behemoth of some magnitude to out hype the third and final outing of Christopher Nolan's thus far impeccable Batman series.



Hawkeye: "Legolas is gay"



Should we be worried? Probably. If big screen history teaches us anything, it's that big, ensemble action pictures with more characters than the Bible generally flatter to deceive. More than most, I want Joss Whedon to disprove this theory and provide the exception to the rule. But it will take something special, something that even the likes of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson couldn't muster, to triumph come next summer.

The odds are stacked against Whedon, however. So far, confirmed characters include Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Bambi, Black Widow and Nick Fury. God is rumoured to be in negotiations to play himself. With blockbusters these days rarely running over 2 and a half hours, this will leave approximately 19 seconds of exposure for each of Marvel's biggest players to stamp their mark and then disappear stage left before the screen explodes. And all this, by the way, will occur after we have seen Mark Ruffalo as the new Hulk and Jeremy Renner take on the role of Hawkeye in their own films, just so that by next summer we have more of a chance of knowing what's going on when they all collide.

Please. Fucking. End.



Oh dear.



It's telling that two of the best and most successful trilogies of the past decade also trod this familiar, bloated path, and paid the price. Spiderman 3 crowbarred in multiple villains in the shape of Venom, The Green Goblin, and Sandman, resulting in  a fatty mess which marred the series as a whole. To a lesser degree, Jackson's inability to end The Return of The King without 176 false starts meant the (still sublime) trilogy climaxing with a whimper instead of a bang.



Whedon clearly has the chops to make complex, character-laden pieces work. Lest we forget this is the man who steered the Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel series' to success, and the writer responsible for penning ensemble pieces like Serenity and Toy Story to such acclaim. But these former successes have been created on a vast canvas, TV's episodic, leisurely pacing giving so much more time to weave such a complex tapestry than the relative confines of a summer blockbuster.

The Avengers will do business, it will probably break records. But it's by avoiding the pitfalls suffered by so many predecessors that The Avengers will ultimately be judged. Here's hoping.