It is over a decade since the Avengers took on an AI villain that seemed impossible to defeat, but in Avengers: Age of Ultron, they did just that and took down James Spader‘s sardonic villain within the usual two-hour-plus runtime. For many Ultron’s demise came far too soon and with the exception of some appearances in Marvel’s What If…? animated series, it seemed that the character’s short time in the MCU was over. That is until now.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has accomplished the impossible by bringing to life a continuing story set in the world of Marvel Comics on a scale no one could have predicted. As if 23 interconnected movies of the Infinity Saga was not enough, Kevin Feige and his team then pressed on into the Multiverse Saga which not only saw the volume of movies continue to rise but also added in dozens of TV shows thanks to the launch of Disney+. While this has allowed the MCU to tell many different stories, it has also seen many iconic Marvel villains make just a fleeting appearance, even those who should have been given much more screen time. Along with on-screen disappointments like Christian Bale’s Gorr and Jonathan Majors’ short-lived Kang tenure, the one-shot appearance of Ultron in the Avengers’ second outing is probably one of the biggest wrongs of the entire franchise. Thanks to new Disney+ series VisionQuest, that has now been remedied and Ultron – or at least a version of him has been brought back to screens.
Marvel’s Big Villain Problem
Image Courtesy of Marvel
Image Courtesy of Marvel Entertainment
When creating an ongoing movie franchise based on more than half a century of characters, it is incredibly hard to bring together all the characters that fans would like to see in the exact way they want to see them. That is why Gorr’s appearance as a near-human character in Thor: Love and Thunder rather than the beastly creature fans had hoped for became one of the many disappointments of the MCU. But it is not only the look of characters that can cause a headache for Kevin Feige and his endless army of producers, directors and writers. What do you do when you have so many big, powerful villains, and a limited number of movies for them to appear in. One of the most frequent complaints about the MCU is how all-powerful bad guys (and girls) and frequently defeated with ease after a single appearance, while their comic book counterparts go on for multiple story arcs and appear across several years or even decades before being rebooted and brought back for more nefarious deeds.
During the last two decades, the only major villain to get a significant amount of screen time across multiple movies has been Thanos. Before his personal issues, Jonathan Majors’ Kang was meant to be a huge threat to the MCU and the multiverse, but when that fell by the wayside, Doctor Doom became the new “big bad” of the Multiverse Saga and will be getting two major appearances in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. This will make him one of the exclusive group of Marvel villains to have been the focus of multiple movies and not dispatched in a single outing. Thanks to this month’s release of VisionQuest, Ultron fans have finally been reacquainted with the AI threat, even if he may not be quite the same character.
Ultron Finally Gets His Time to Shine (and Not Through Multiverse Tricks)
While several dead characters have been revived thanks to the multiverse, Ultron’s return to screens inVisionQuest is a little different. The new series picks up after the events of WandaVision, with Paul Bettany’s resurrected Vision trying to find his way in the world without Wanda. After regaining his memories at the end of the MCU’s first TV show, Vision is now partly living in a kind of utopia inside his own digital brain along with avatars of many of Tony Stark’s AI systems including J.A.R.V.I.S and F.R.I.D.A.Y. Also a resident of this computer-generated world, confined to the attic room of Vision’s home, is Ultron, who is forced by Vision to maintain a human avatar form – allowing James Spader to get some much needed screen-time as the character.
The perfect spin on Ultron works on many different levels, all of which finally give a character that is a long-term threat in the comics his dues on screen. In Age of Ultron, the AI creation was newly born and quite often prone to immature tantrums when not getting his own way. In VisionQuest, Spader’s on-screen appearance has seen Ultron become a more contemplative and sophisticated intelligence – which could well make him even more dangerous as a result. Ultron should never have been a one-shot villain, even in an Avengers movie, and instead could have been developed across multiple movies as a true AI threat to the world. What his intentions are in VisionQuest remain unclear, but his devious underbelly has already been exposed in the first two episodes. Whatever befalls him by the end of VisionQuest, Ultron’s return is one that has been long overdue in the MCU and with real-world AI capabilities and dangers being a constant discussion point, it could not have come at a better time.
How do you think Ultron fits into VisionQuest‘s overarching story? Will be become the villain again? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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