So Avengers: Age of Ultron has been released (haven’t seen it yet, don’t know if I will get the chance to before it hits home video) and the first night or so it made a ton of money and looked like its box office would overtake the original Avengers movie but by the time the weekend was over, the film had earned less than its predecessor.

Not that this lesser haul makes it a financial failure.  But it is a curious turn of events and at the very least may hint to the limits of profits from these features.

I believe it also hints to something regarding group mentality, something I’ve mentioned previously.

Granted I have no evidence to prove this, but I get the feeling the public at large has reached some kind of… I don’t know, tipping/saturation point regarding these particular Marvel heroes.

Where before audiences would go into these movies with an open mind and were willing to ignore plot points that didn’t make sense (there were plenty of them in the first Avengers film as well as my so-far favorite of the Marvel films, Captain America: Winter Soldier), this time around they appear a lot more discerning.  Or perhaps picky.

This sort of thing has happened before.  Remember the Christopher Nolan directed Batman films?  The first was imperfect, at least to my mind (I still feel the way Batman left Ra’s Al Ghul to die on the train was absolutely NOT something Batman would do) but so clearly its own animal that you couldn’t help but be impressed with that take of the Batman mythos.  The second benefited tremendously with the addition of Heath Ledger’s Joker.  But the third film, a film I felt in the end was on par with the others, ie entertaining yet with its share of imperfections, was savaged by many previous fans of the films as a misfire.

Which leads me to reiterate what I said above: Perhaps audiences, when given so much of a good thing, inevitably and more readily find the flaws in said products.  Maybe this is related in some way to expectations.  Your expectations become so big that anything that doesn’t quite reach those lofty realms gets jumped on.

So it goes with Avengers: Age of Ultron.  While audiences and critics in general seem to like the film, I get the feeling the reaction to this movie is far more muted while a fraction of fans have latched on to things they don’t like about the film and are far more vocal in denouncing them.

And it seems the particular thing people don’t like about this film is the way Scarlett Johannson’s Black Widow is portrayed:

http://io9.com/black-widow-this-is-why-we-can-t-have-nice-things-1702333037

It’s a most curious firestorm regarding an otherwise well received and successful addition to a movie franchise.

Having not seen the film, I don’t feel I can comment on the accuracy/inaccuracy of the observations presented in this article.  But I do find it curious the way some are now hurling stones at a franchise that, up to this moment, they almost all loved universally.

Perhaps that’s just the way things go.