Box Office: 'Avengers: Age Of Ultron' Passes $1 Billion Worldwide, How Will Marvel Recover?


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Thanks in part $90 million in the first four days of play in China and a whopping $76m this far in South Korea among other markets, Walt Disney's DIS +0.34% Avengers: Age of Ultron has passed $1 billion worldwide today. It was at $990 million as of yesterday, so it should be passing the magic milestone by the end of this sentence. It is the 21st film to cross the respective box office milestone, doing so in its 24th day of global play.
That’s among the faster such dashes, doing the deed slower than Furious 7 (17 days) and the 19 days needed for The Avengers, Avatar, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II. The only questions are whether it hits $425m-450m domestic or $450m-$500m domestic as well as whether or not it can pass the $1.5 billion total of The Avengers (and soon Furious 7). Obviously a big part of that puzzle is how much the film makes in China (and eventually Japan) with the always present caveat being that studios get back less of the ticket sales from China theaters and that international deflation has pushed down the pure dollar grosses for would-be blockbusters. This should pretty much clear up the idea that Avengers: Age of Ultron is in any plausible way damaging either in the short term or the long term to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There are no permanent cracks in this system quite yet and it’s every bit as possible that the next Marvel movies can be great or terrible in relatively equal probability.

To those who didn’t care for it, and with the knowledge that it received plenty of praise from other critics and pundits, the biggest problem with Avengers: Age of Ultron is that it felt unnecessary and counterproductive in terms of the overall Marvel narrative. It ignored or somewhat undercut character development and status quo changes that occurred in Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It told a story (Tony Stark creates a genocidal murder robot) that should have had massive consequences yet was mostly ended on a “no harm, no foul” note. I’d speculate that this was partially due to the fact that (A) Joss Whedon didn’t really want to come back for a second Avengers film and (B) Robert Downey Jr. joining Captain America 3 turned said third Cap movie into the big “status quo shakeup” that Age of Ultron was supposed to be in the first place. It had a director who arguably didn’t want to come back. It was a film that only existed in the long form story arc because the first one made $1.5 billion worldwide. It had a studio that was eager to move past it and get to the stuff they really wanted to do.
That Avengers: Age of Ultron didn’t work (for me and others who share my frustration) merely means that the Marvel brain trust made a bad movie, not that their entire system is flawed and doomed to fail over the long term. The specific problems with the film itself aren’t likely to be repeated and the issues with the long form narrative can be fixed at any time. Captain America: Civil War is a chance to prove that the artistic squabbles that plagued Age of Ultron was something of a fluke, and that the Marvel machine is still running smoothly with a project that everyone is excited about and where everyone actually wants to be there. Ironically, the thing that hurt Age of Ultron the most is its sense of disposability, which in turn arguably shields the Marvel universe from its relative (artistic) impact. It doesn’t need to exist, which also means we can choose to ignore it if we so please. But its issues are not flaws in the design. They are merely issues made by specific artists and marketing executives in relation to this specific film and how it was released.
Kevin Feige and company can make the choice to stop reviving dead characters. They can stop threatening the entire world in a giant mid-air battle at the end of every new movie. They can stop inserting scenes that exist only to sell future movies. They can stop telling everyone who will be back in the next few Marvel movies before the present one comes out. They can hold off on announcing the long term plans until after the would-be event movie drops thus negating any suspense and tension from the narrative. They can stop making statements promising that nothing will ever get too dire in the Marvel Universe. The things that currently plague the Marvel Universe, to the extent that their would-be formula for production and marketing needs to be “fixed” in light of obvious successes, are specific choices that can be adhered to or altered on each individual film as the producers and filmmakers see fit.
As much fun as it was to attend that big Phase 3 announcement event back in October, Marvel did drop a four years’ worth of upcoming releases on us at one time. Comparatively, when The Avengers came out, all we knew was that there would be a next chapter for Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America and that Loki would certainly survive The Avengers. It wasn’t until that year’s Comic Con that we got titles for Captain America 2, Thor 2, a teaser for Iron Man 3, and a firm announcement of Guardians of the Galaxy. How much more suspenseful would Avengers: Age of Ultron have been had we known nothing concrete about the future Marvel movies beyond Ant Man, a theoretical Captain America 3 and Thor 3, and (when the time came) the new Spider-Man movie news? It’s a rhetorical question, but when critics and pundits complain about how the future Marvel movies lessen the suspense/tension of the current Marvel movie they are speaking to a marketing problem as opposed to an artistic one.
The powers-that-be at Marvel and Disney can make the choice at any moment to stop doing the things we all complain about in Marvel movies. They could give us more center-of-focus female characters beyond just Black Widow as well, but that’s another conversation. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is doing just fine, give or take a few bumps in the road. And frankly the biggest insurance policy against audience fatigue, which admittedly might negate my complaint about over-sharing future plans, is the fact that this story has a clear end in sight. I have no idea what Marvel is planning after Avengers: Infinity Wars part II, but we all know that there is an end to all of this. Even if some of us start to get comparatively burned out over the Phase 3 stuff, we’ll mostly all be there for the end just to see how the final battle with Thanos plays out.  Despite all of the handwringing and despite all of the think pieces, Avengers: Age of Ultron is going to be one of the biggest-grossing movies of all-time here and abroad. My issues with the film aside, that has to count as a pretty big win.

forbes.

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Sandhurst's sheikhs: Why do so many Gulf royals receive military training in the UK? A parade outside the building at Sandhurst Continue reading the main story In today's Magazine The death list that names 5,000 victims Is this woman an apostate? Voices from a WW1 prison camp The Swiss selfie scandal Generations of foreign royals - particularly from the Middle East - have learned to be military leaders at the UK's Sandhurst officer training academy. But is that still a good idea, asks Matthew Teller. Since 1812, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, on the Surrey/Berkshire border, has been where the British Army trains its officers. It has a gruelling 44-week course testing the physical and intellectual skills of officer cadets and imbuing them with the values of the British Army. Alongside would-be British officers, Sandhurst has a tradition of drawing cadets from overseas. Many of the elite families of the Middle East have sent their sons and daughters. 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The Emir of Dubai Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum with his son after his Passing Out Parade at Sandhurst in 2006 Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Emir of Dubai, with his son in uniform at Sandhurst in 2006 Her Majesty The Queen's Representative His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, The Emir of Qatar inspects soldiers during the 144th Sovereign's Parade held at The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst on April 8, 2004 in Camberley, England. Some 470 Officer cadets took part of which 219 were commissioned into the British Army Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar until 2013, inspects soldiers at Sandhurst in 2004 Emotion doesn't always deliver. In 2013, despite the personal intervention of David Cameron, the UAE decided against buying the UK's Typhoon fighter jets. But elsewhere fellow feeling is paying dividends. 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Over the years donations like this have saved the UK taxpayer a considerable amount of money." But what happens when Sandhurst's friends become enemies? In 2001, then-prime minister Tony Blair visited Damascus, marking a warming of relations between the UK and Syria. Shortly after, in 2003, Sandhurst was training officers from the Syrian armed forces. Now, of course, Syria is an international pariah. Journalist Michael Cockerell has written about Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi's time at the Army School of Education in Beaconsfield in 1966: "Three years [later], Gaddafi followed a tradition of foreign officers trained by the British Army. He made use of his newfound knowledge to seize political power in his own country." Ahmed Ali Sandhurst-trained Ahmed Ali was a key player in the Egyptian military's removal of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi That tradition persists. In the 1990s Egyptian colonel Ahmed Ali attended Sandhurst. 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