October 14th saw Chris Hardwick moderating a panel with Chris Evans, Tom Hiddleston, Cobie Smulders, Mark Ruffalo and Kevin Feige. We’ve got some great content from NYCC with some very interesting new information that makes me look forwards to the movie even more!
In a new scene that Kevin Feige introduces, we got to see plenty of more footage of Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner and The Hulk. It was a scene between Bruce Banner and Scarlett Johansson‘s Black Widow. She’s hunting Bruce Banner in what looks like India. When she finds him, she explains how Nick Fury wants him back, to which he wonders how they found him. She answers that they never lost him in the first place. He threatens to become a little angry, but she pulls a gun on him, at which point he relaxes a little. She tells the two dozen armed assassins outside to stand down.
In another scene that was shown for the first time, Tony Stark and Loki are having a conversation and shows how he has managed to get on the wrong side of the Avengers. The scene ends withTony Stark asking Banner about how it is that he manages to keep his anger under control. Chris Evans as Captain America steps in and asks a simple question. “Is everything a joke to you?” Robert Downey Jr. answers ”Funny things are”.
I’m still wondering why we’re not seeing any traces of Cobie Smulders in any of the footage that’s been released so far, and I’m hoping she doesn’t have such a minor role in the movie that she just isn’t available in any of the shots that they pick out.
One of my favorite moments in the questions comes when Tom Hiddleston tells the story of how people were in a club, dancing and celebrating the way the movie was going, Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth were the only ones not dancing. Instead, Evans was he was standing in a corner trying to get Hemsworth to explain how he managed to get his muscles so big. Tom Hiddleston even brings out a perfect imitation of Chris’s Australian accent in “I don’t know, I just work out and stuff”.
In the last question, a question aimed at Kevin Feige, he was asked where the Marvel franchise is moving, we learn that pre-production on Iron Man 3 is going on, and that it will be leading into “phase two”, which then follows into what will later become the main story line for The Avengers 2. The main story stories for Inhumans and Guardians of the Galaxy will be handled separately and will not be getting an ‘Avengers’ treatment where the various characters get movies of their own leading into the group movies.
So there we have it, folks! The end of The Avengers will be leading us into “Phase 2″, which may – or may not – include introductions of Ant-Man, The Inhumans, Guardians of the Galaxy and Doctor Strange. I can easily see how they put Ant-Man in there, since he’s already a character closely tied to The Avengers in the comics; but I’m afraid the others will be handled completely separately. I’m kind of hoping that Marvel will bring everything back home over time now, adding to the grander Marvel Universe as we know it, but we’ll just have to wait and see what Kevin Feige has in mind for us all.
Last, but not least, enjoy the fourty-five minutes of the panel. All movie footage has been removed, but the interviews are all in there: