Marvel's The Avengers

Marvel's The Avengers is the 2012 Marvel Studios live-action feature film adapting the Marvel Comics team of the same name. It is the first film in the Avengers film series. It also follows The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger.

This movie finds Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) assembling a team of the super-human operatives: Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) to stop Loki (Tom Hiddleston) who has stolen the Tesseract (known in the comics as "the cosmic cube") from S.H.I.E.L.D. While the team struggles to gel, Loki ushers in an interplanetary war on New York City.

The movie is directed by Joss Whedon from his own script. The crowd-pleasing summer tentpole was well-received by fans and critics alike. It was the highest-grossing movie of the year and became the third highest-grossing movie of all time.

Marvel Studios, under Kevin Feige, performed the unheralded feat of melding four feature film franchises into one super-group, something they'd promised to do since the original Iron Man debuted. It was the realization of "shared universe" experience on a scale that fans had only dreamed of. The stinger for the film also planted the seed of the uber-villain Thanos (played here by Damion Poitier), a plot point that would continue to play out over Marvel's productions in the coming years.

The Avengers is followed by Avengers: Age of Ultron.