Avengers

"And there came a day, a day unlike any other... when Earth's mightiest heroes found themselves united against a common threat... to fight the foes no single superhero could withstand... on that day, the Avengers were born."

- Nick Fury

The Avengers are a team of super-heroes assembled by Nick Fury and the intelligence agency S.H.I.E.L.D. through the Avenger Initiative. They exist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and feature all the heroes of Marvel Studios' independent productions. They first appeared as a team in 2012's ''The Avengers. ''The Avengers were formed to combat threats that could not be dealt with alone.

The team currently consists of Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, Nick Fury and Hawkeye. They were intitially brought together by S.H.I.E.L.D. to combat Loki, Thor's adoptive brother. The Avengers are based on the superhero team created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and feature a similar roster to Mark Millar's Ultimates, the Ultimate Marvel Universe version of the team. The team was initially formed by Nick Fury to "fight the battles that [S.H.I.E.L.D.] never could".

Behind the scenes

 * Joss Whedon talked about the power levels of the various Avengers: "I had to find a way to service all the characters, to figure out why they're in the room in the first place. My biggest concern was that if I didn't pay enough attention to minutiae then the film would become generic in its concepts and visuals. Or that I'd be so concentrated on those things, I'd look around and the film wouldn't be about anything."
 * On the action scenes and what Whedon terms "the hierarchy of power". "If this guy hits someone, he falls down. If this guy hits someone, he flies backwards. Its very complicated."
 * Whedon commented on Mark Ruffalo's 'Hulk' actions: "It's fun to say that Mark Ruffalo and I fought a great deal, because he's the sweetest man that I may ever have met. Yes, we did actually lay out some mats and tussle but just trying to figure out what the Hulk would be doing, what a person does in a real fight. Once he gets angry you have to keep asking "well what's making him angry now..." and go moment-to-moment. That's been the hardest thing in this movie. Mark is tremendous, I think he's going to blow people away - again - and we've gone where nobody has. We [have] Hulk in the house and everything pisses him off."

Trivia

 * The roster of the team is similar to that of the Ultimates roster in the comic book miniseries The Ultimates. The Ultimates were conceived as the Ultimate Marvel Universe's equivalent of the mainstream Avengers. The Avengers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe bear a strong resemblance to the Ultimates in that they were formed by S.H.I.E.L.D. as a government-sponsored team to combat the threat of the Chitauri. Like in The Ultimates 2, the team leaves S.H.I.E.L.D. employ and becomes independent.
 * Henry Pym (Ant-Man) and The Wasp are on the original Avengers roster in the mainstream comics, as well as their Ultimate universe versions being in the first roster of the Ultimates, but are absent from the live-action film.
 * The speech in the first teasrer trailer was taken from the introduction of many Avengers comic books since the 1970s. In the TV series The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the new intro features Nick Fury stating a speech similar to this one.
 * The movie's roster will be seen in the next animated series Avengers Assmeble with Falcon.