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Marvel's Avengers Movie Might Be CGI or 3D?!

by Alex Billington
March 5, 2008
Source: Collider, IESB

Let's not jump to conclusions just yet! Everything contained within is purely speculation and purely geek excitement at the extreme. Writer, producer, and director Zak Penn just finished an interview with Collider and shared with them some very juicy details on Marvel's supposed upcoming Avengers movie. While we can confirm what Zak Penn says, don't take any of the speculation surrounding what it means as fact - from this point forward it's all for the sake of discussion and consideration and not truth. With that being said, let's take a look at what Penn had to say about Avengers.

Now to clarify why Zak Penn (pictured) is the right guy to tell us about the Avengers movie, he's been previously announced by Marvel as the writer attached to that film. Zak wrote the screenplays for X-Men 2, Elektra, and X-Men 3, so he is fairly experienced in the world of superheroes and actually mentions that Marvel consults him a lot on their films. His latest project is a poker film called The Grand (watch the trailer here) about a real-life poker tournament, but that's a story for another day.

When asked about if he would ever consider doing animated comic book movies (we think he meant like the recently released Justice League: The New Frontier, although Zak takes it differently), he replied with the following:

"Absolutely. It's not only something I've considered doing, but there's been the discussion about The Avengers doing some sort of next level... Whatever the next iteration of computer animation is after this, the next step after Beowulf, is something we would definitely conisder for that."

"And I actually think it's worth considering for a lot of movies, I think it's amazing. It has a tremendous amount of potential. And I love animated movies, and I've produced animated movies, and I wrote the original story for Antz. It would definitely interest me."

From what it sounds like, Zak is implying that the Avengers movie could (key word) become something like an animated movie that is the next level beyond Beowulf, which was a 3D CGI movie. As far as I can imagine, we're talking about very photorealistic CGI and motion capture, maybe along the lines of what James Cameron is doing with Avatar. Which brings up the question of whether they're holding off on an Avengers movie because they want the individual franchises to develop and the technology to advance to a point even beyond Avatar where they can really go all out.

When I imagine a technology like that being used for a movie like Avengers, I'm thinking about some of the most elaborate fight scenes ever shot while still being very life-like. There would (probably) be upwards of ten superheroes each with their own powers involved, so the only way to really make that work without giving this a $500 million+ budget would be to implement CGI or animated technology like Zak mentions. Does that make sense now?

That's as much speculation as I'll provide, because beyond that it's up to you to interpret what Zak meant. An Avengers movie would probably become one of the most ambitious comic book projects ever, which is why it's interesting to hear that this is the direction they're heading.

Zak goes on to say later in the interview that for the next six to eight months he's actually creating a TV show called "Section 8" as well as another unannounced Fox movie that he pitched from scratch before the strike. So from the sounds of it, an Avengers movie is still a very long way out, but we already knew that! And another note related to Avengers - Iron Man director Jon Favreau has previously said that he "might get to direct that Avengers movie", if Iron Man does well that is.

Update: IESB also posted a small quote from Zak Penn from the press conferences yesterday as well.

"The Avengers is a project in the future," says Penn, "That's the best way to put it until Iron Man and The Hulk come out. I haven't talked to Marvel about it in awhile because I think that the best way to do it is to put together a movie that uses all the characters and so they probably want to see how the movies do and figure that out first."

The Avengers movie really is a project that everyone loves to talk about. It's such an enormous idea that would be a dream come true for every last comic book fan. There is just a lot to and we've got to get past all of the individual superhero movies first. We'll be sure to keep you updated on anything we hear and keep everyone dreaming until it actually goes into production.

What do you think about what Zak said and the idea of a CGI / animated Avengers movie?

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