Corona | Coming Attractions

One of the things that I've watched unfold from my small corner of the online movie community is the need for several online movie peeps to be the first to tweet about their (indeed) fortunate privilege to watch an early screening of a hyped movie. Yesterday it was for The Avengers, and as is typical of several of these personalities, the tweets began and started to answer most of the heavy geek questions like, "Who are the aliens that Loki commands?" and "What's the end credits scene show?"

Shit like this doesn't drive me as bonkers as it used to but, that said, I can't help but do some eye-rolling. I'm not going to single out anyone in particular as I think that this is a collective act happening. One person can't help but say something about The Avengers and then that unleashes a tide of tweets from multiple individuals. (And, to be fair, the big daddys of film scoopage, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, have bothed broken embargos before as well as blown spoilers in their early reviews.)

If I'm working my way to a point for this news story, it's this: the early buzz for the quality of The Avengers movie is good, if not really good. People are calling it the best Marvel action movie so far and that Joss Whedon has brought his A-game to the picture. That's what you can take from these early appraisals of the quality of the film. Now comes the spoilerish material so break away if you must.

First, Loki's muscle is indeed mentioned as the Chitauri. For those of you that exist outside the comic book store, this is the name of the alien race used in the Ultimate Avengers comic book series. (Since 20th Century Fox owns the movie rights to Fantastic Four, and thus the villain known as the Super-Skrull, Disney can't call the shape-changing Skrulls by that name...so comic writer Mark Millar got around it by creating an Ultimate universe shape-changing alien race called the Chitauri.)

Second, during the Avengers press junket held Thursday, Robert Downey Jr. mentioned that Whedon was shooting a short, eleventh hour scene that night for the film. That sounds both crazy and impossible, especially considering that the movie is screening for early reviews. But according to Badass Digest's Devin Faraci, this scene is a fact and has been confirmed by Avengers co-star Mark Ruffalo. What's the scene supposed to be about? No one's saying much. Maybe, and I'm just theorizing here, it'll be for the DVD release of Avengers and not for the theatrical cut.

As for myself, I get to see The Avengers a couple of days ahead of the rest of the world. By then the whole movie should already be spoiled online, if you want to find it, and/or pirated for torrents. That won't stop the movie from making $125 million dollars on its opening weekend, and that's probably just the low-end of the expected grosses.