Fruitless speculation!!!

[seriousfic]

I suppose the smart money on an Avengers 2 villain is Thanos. No offense, but I've always seen the guy as a poor man's Darkseid. And I've always believed that Darkseid is pretty boring without the Fourth World to back him up. He's like Sauron without Middle-Earth that way (thank you for proving my point, Geoff Johns' first arc of Justice League). Thanos is Darkseid in a continuity where the Fourth World doesn't exist. No Big Barda, just... Starfox, the Date Rape Avenger. No, he doesn't avenge date rape, he's an Avenger with the power of Date Rape. Is it any wonder the guy who came up with him went on to write Death of the New Gods?

Tl;dr Thanos no thank you. But then you've got Kang the Conqueror. He's an arch-villain akin to Thanos, but with a bit more going on there. With time travel, you could get in some pretty awesome stories--sending Cap back to the 1940s for some pathos, letting Bruce Banner meet his evil future self, the Maestro--I'm sure I'm forgetting some cool future canon that would fall under the Avengers banner. Plus, going by his take in Avengers: EMH, you could have him trying to prevent some future catastrophe. With Kang defeated, Iron Man would become obsessed with trying to stop the same catastrophe, and create the SHRA.

Now, maybe Hulk soured the waters for superhero psychodrama, but here's where you bring in Ant-Man. You have all the ingredients there for some great drama: an innocent young woman drawn into tragedy, a noble, peaceful hero with mental problems, the robot he uploads his personality into... all the stuff Shakespeare would use. You can't tell me there's no drama in an unstable superhero seeing his neurosis writ large in a robotic son. But a story like that wouldn't leave much room for the other Avengers, so it's best kept to its own Wasp/Ant-Man/Ultron film.

Then Avengers 3 rolls around. Say Ant-Man's retired in disgrace, while Wasp and/or Vision have joined the Avengers. Tony is going on about registration--or possibly the other way around, with Steve supporting the status quo and the more libertarian cinematic Tony saying no way. Things take a turn for the worse and the superheroes, including a bunch of "second wave" heroes who aren't in the Avengers, split up. Two acts of superhero-on-superhero violence, then it turns out that a not-dead Ultron has been manipulating the entire conflict; say, using the Vision on the anti-reg side and infecting Tony's Extremis systems on the pro-reg side (I'm assuming Tony will "upgrade" himself at some point in the endless sequels). Ultron destroys Slorenia, a la Avengers Unlimited, and starts Program: Take Over The World.

So, huge third act of both sides teaming up to take on Ultron and his robot army, with the fall-out from the (resolved) conflict coloring future movies. Plus, keeping Ultron as a third act surprise keeps him from getting stale. And it leaves room for Vision/Wanda (c'mon, you gotta have Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch in an Avengers sequel somewhere).

Comments

[jlbarnett.livejournal.com]

Iron Man has Iron Man 2020, Arno Stark. He's like a cousin of Tony who ends up running Stark Industries. Incredibly poorly. So he ends up using the Iron Man suit to work as a mercenary

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, have you read much of Starlin's old Thanos stuff? Not just Infinity Gauntlet, but, like, The Thanos Quest? I've only recently gotten into Marvel cosmic, and have read a bunch of Thanos. I've always thought that Thanos was the poor man's Darkseid too, and I still do, but recently I've come to like Thanos better. Darkseid's the better villain, but Thanos is the more interesting, complex character. Does that distinction make sense? I hope I'm making sense.

As such, I don't really see Thanos being used properly as an Avengers villain. He's much more effectively when he's opposed to a single hero like Mar-Vell or the Silver Surfer, or fucking over other villains like Mephisto. He's best when he's on the sidelines playing his own game, like Scorpius in Farscape. In fact, now whenever I read Thanos, I will hear Scorpy's voice in my head. It works.

And even if they could use a well-written, well-acted Thanos as a villain opposite the Avengers, there's no way they could do him justice. Even more than Darkseid, a good Thanos story requires so much psychedelic reality-bending Kirby/Ditko shit that no big name studio would ever back that. Not in a world where Galactus gets turned into a fucking cloud because studios are convinced that audiences can't handle the original stuff from the comics that look and sound like stuff from comic books. Can't have that, now can we?

Yes, Kang all the way. That's a story with scope and ambition, a perfect opponent for the whole team, and a fantastic villain in his own right. And as a set-up for Ultron? Fuck yes. Both of those could also be tweaked for audience-friendly redesigns without losing too much of their comic roots.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

I could see Thanos as a puppet-master in, say, a Ms. Marvel movie (since I think she's the most mainstream of the cosmic heroes; sorry, Rocket Raccoon). Maybe introduce the Kree in one movie, the Skrull and another, and have Thanos as the Big Bad of the Kree-Skrull War in an Avengers movie. He beats 'the Kree Supreme Intelligence' or what have you.

[liliaeth]

Honestly, the most important thing I need to see in the second Avengers movie, is for at least two women to officially join the team. Personally I'd go for Ms Marvel and the Wasp. Especially considering all the links they've been making to SHIELD's involvement.

I mean, they could use Carol as the view point character, with her getting her powers and becoming involved in the fight (esp. if they make the Kree the bad guys) and getting her as a new offical member of the Avengers.

(I'm not much of a fan of Black Widow because she lacks superpowers and the movie already has two non-powered characters as mayor players, but at least with two more women, you'd have the spy, the socialite and the career military, showing a little bit more diversion in the female chars than the movie seems to be having so far.)