Hey, awards season: Take a break for a minute. The summer blockbusters get one last hurrah for the year as the much-anticipated first trailer for Marvel's The Avengers: Age of Ultron—the follow-up to one of the most successful blockbusters of all time—leaked online today.
When footage of Ultron screened at Comic-Con over the summer, the talking points were about James Spader's performance as Ultron (he's the voice of the all-powerful robot that comes to wipe out our titular heroes) and the absolute dread awaiting both the Avengers and the world. This first trailer doesn't go as far as that Comic Con footage reportedly did, but we do see glimpses:
- The Avengers—joined by, from the looks of freeze-framing on the tableau, Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), and Jane Foster (Natalie Portman)—gathered at Tony Stark's pad, interrupted by the arrival of Ultron
- Tantalizing snippets of new characters Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen)
- Iron Man in his "Hulk-busting" super suit (above)
- A grim shot of Captain America's broken shield that cuts off just as it begins to pan across a person
This CinemaBlend report of the Comic Con footage describes the rest of that shot, which you can avoid if you're particularly spoiler-averse. Today's trailer wasn't built to give anything away.
"I Got No Strings"
The most immediately grabby element of the trailer is the song, an eerie, ghostly rendition of "I Got No Strings" from Disney's Pinocchio, a clever bit of keeping things within the corporate family that reflects the content of the movie, as we see Ultron repeat the movie's dialogue ("I had strings / but now I'm free / there are no strings on me") to sinister effect. The song's unsettling, and has gotten a lot of viewers talking, though people have seen this trick before in the trailer for Maleficent, which already went to the Disney song vault with Lana Del Rey's similarly droning "Once Upon a Dream" cover.