So what to expect? If you ask us, actually, very little. The idea of a cross-pollinated superhero universe onscreen sounds ambitious and exciting, but with all that money at stake (and with “Avengers” being the penultimate Paramount-distributed Marvel effort before the brand moves to Disney), Marvel is going to be desperate to avoid what could be a quirky, unconventional tent pole release. So we decided to come up with a practical dream team list of those who could tackle that massive onscreen effort, a film which would need to have a consistent tone despite featuring elements present from the ideas of four separate directors— Favreau (“Iron Man”), Louis Letterier (“The Incredible Hulk”), Kenneth Branagh (“Thor”) and probably Joe Johnston (“Captain America”). We figured there were two requirements being batted around in regards to Marvel’s options, not including availability, and they are.
-Experienced Helmers Only – Marvel’s not gonna take a chance on a young director or some “indie maverick” because they have an interesting style or compelling ideas. A lot is at stake — if “The Avengers” fails, maybe audiences will still turn out for “Iron Man 3” but will they bother with a “Thor 2”? Or even movies spun off from “The Avengers,” like the mooted “Ant-Man”? So don’t expect them to start trusting Neill Blomkamp or Duncan Jones with their first ever mega-budgeted film (and count on that — the price tag for this won’t be any less than $300 million).
-No One Too Powerful – Marvel’s defining their brand by hiring people who will take orders, and not some well-established visionary who will make certain creative or financial demands. While the movies themselves will feature expensive sets, location shooting and special effects, the studio will skimp when it comes time to work on salaries, as Terrence Howard found out the hard way. They’ve started a collective of writers to produce ideas for their upcoming movies, which is the sort of practice a big-time guy would scoff at — Marvel wants to avoid the moment where they say, “No, Vision is all wrong, robots don’t look like that,” only to be answered with, “I’m Ridley Scott. I made ‘Blade Runner.’” And with that budget, forget anyone who might take a backend profit share.
Here are the five directors who would be best suited to bringing “The Avengers” to life:
Kathryn Bigelow – Bigelow is tentatively scheduled to start development on “Triple Frontier” soon, but after that, the breakout director of “The Hurt Locker” is conspicuously unattached to anything. Bigelow went off the grid to shoot “Locker” and would be welcomed back into the studio scene with open arms for any big tent pole, really. And while her work can certainly be dissected and analyzed by film professors and the frou frou intelligentsia, her work primarily appeals to audiences seeking a sharp, intense adrenaline rush. Go back to 1991, and ask anyone who’s just seen “Point Break” if they’d want its director to helm an “Avengers” movie, and you’d be impaled by a nerd boner.
Phillip Noyce – Noyce is one of the few big budget directors who can also deliver a credible amount of brains with his brawn. He’s been a sudden hot property in Hollywood, mostly as Tom Cruise’s director of choice, following him from “The Tourist” to “The 28th Amendment” to “Salt” before Cruise departed the project. Noyce has the credentials, having helmed two Jack Ryan stories, while also having the resume that impresses actors, especially 2002’s double serve of “Rabbit Proof Fence” and “The Quiet American.” If “Avengers” goes full-on in depicting SHIELD as a government agency, Noyce is one of the guys in Hollywood capable of depicting the action needed along with the experience of depicting political subterfuge in a high stakes environment.
José Padilha – An unknown, and a pretty damn long shot, but Padihla was the director behind one of the more intense action pictures in recent years, the full-throttle “Elite Squad.” The Brazilian helmer, who also directed the compelling doc “Bus 174” knows how to blend real life verisimilitude with gritty ground-level action. He’s loosely attached to a Robert Ludlum adaptation in “The Sigma Protocol” but there’s no reason Marvel can’t get him on the cheap, and there’s nothing to suggest Padihla doesn’t have the chops to handle the action.
Brad Bird- Despite his roots as an animation guy, Bird’s long been developing his first live action feature, “1906,” about a real life earthquake that ravaged San Francisco in the early twentieth century. Does he have the goods? Maybe a rewatching of “The Incredibles” is in order to be convinced that this guy just gets superheroes. Granted, “The Avengers” would be taking place in a pseudo-realistic world that, so far, is nearly ashamed of its four-color roots, while “The Incredibles” was nearly the opposite. Still, most will say that Pixar’s finest offerings, “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles,” came from Bird, while “The Iron Giant,” which also traded off superhero imagery, remains a beloved basic cable staple. Among the directors possibly being considered, Bird has earned the consideration.
P.T. Anderson – And why the hell not? Hollywood’s dirty secret is that most directors of a certain age, even the art house ones, are secretly comic nerds. We thought about Oliver Stone, who was long linked to the defunct “Superman” relaunch in the late nineties, and Quentin Tarantino, who wrote Silver Surfer-related dialogue for “Crimson Tide” and featured the character in the background of “Reservoir Dogs,” but we opted for Anderson for pretty good reasons. Think about this— no one does sprawling character pieces quite like Anderson, and with “Avengers,” he’s guaranteed to have a crop of pretty interesting actors to use. Who wouldn’t be interested in “Avengers” as a multi-tiered “Nashville”-type story, with a host of flawed heroes battling their own insecurities? Any villain used for the “Avengers” movie is bound to be less interesting than the group dynamics, so Marvel should exploit this. And hell, “There Will Be Blood” might have been affordable, but it looked and felt epic, and its that sort of grandiosity that we haven’t yet seen in a Marvel film. Imagine “Boogie Nights,” but with superheroics instead of porn.
More on the practical tip, here are the five directors we see very possibly being signed for “Avengers”:
Louis Leterrier – While “The Incredible Hulk” didn’t necessarily impress the bean counters at Marvel, execs speak glowing of the film, which they credit as being partially responsible for the birth of the onscreen Marvel universe. “Iron Man” was the breadwinner, but future Marvel films will probably be a lot like “Hulk,” with a continuity-heavy approach that references the other heroes in the universe seamlessly. By the time it comes to hire an “Avengers” director, Letterier will be coming off the mega budgeted “Clash of the Titans,” an all-star adventure that’s sure to earn him the extra attention, so Marvel might regret not signing him when the time was right.
Bryan Singer – Marvel’s going to want some experience behind the camera, and few know superheroes quite as well as Bryan Singer at this point. Singer doesn’t seem to be done with the superhero world- he’s been in talks with Fox about a return to the “X-Men” franchise and has always been open about returning to the world of “Superman.” Even his next film, “Jack and the Giant Killer” sounds pretty super-heroic. Bringing Singer onboard would be a way of repaying him for slaving away at Fox on those two “X-Men” projects, which he supposedly didn’t get nearly the budget he desired each time.
Len Wiseman – While a terrible, terrible director, it’s hard to argue with the results of a Len Wiseman picture. Both “Underworld” films he directed close to tripled their budgets in theatrical grosses and “Live Free or Die Hard” was the highest grossing film in that series. Wiseman just jumped off directing “Motorcade” and the “Underworld” franchise seems to be motoring along without him, but this jerk would rather be out directing more terrible movies instead of staying home with his delicious wife Kate Beckinsale. A Wiseman movie would be loud, stupid, filled with unnecessary CGI, and quite possibly simply all blue, but to Marvel, it might make money and that’s possibly all that matters?
Francis Lawrence- Lawrence has proved himself on the big blockbuster level already, debuting with comic debut “Constantine” and “I Am Legend,” the latter of which made nearly $600 million worldwide, a gross “The Avengers” might have to approach. Lawrence doesn’t have much experience elsewhere, but he’s an accomplished music video director, so he would surely give “The Avengers” a flashy sheen and an action movie tempo. Beyond that, judging from his filmography, he won’t give you much else, but the suits at Marvel might only be looking for so much.
Ron Howard – Marvel keeps surprising us in regards to the talent they attract for their films, but we have to think with something as mega huge as “The Avengers” they’re going to want to bring in a massive heavy hitter. Enter Howard, who fits the description of an A-List director who won’t threaten with any discernible vision or message, has no problem with material that’s beneath him, and is a magnet for box office success. Howard’s not locked into anything particularly right now- he’s been flirting with, among other things, a bad-idea action biopic of H.P. Lovecraft, and is forever attached to co-direct “Arrested Development” — so he could surely clear out his schedule. Marvel needs all the pieces to fall in place for “Avengers” and as far as bringing in the cash, few directors are as much of a lock to produce on that level as Howard is. Plus, the budgetary burdens could be eased by Howard’s Imagine Entertainment coming aboard as co-producers. It would be the least-interesting “Avengers” movie you could make, but everyone would be swimming in the dough.