Movie · Phase 2

Avengers: Age of Ultron

2015 · 141 min

The Avengers raid Strucker's HYDRA base, recover Loki's scepter and discover the Mind Stone inside it. Tony and Bruce use it to finish a global defence AI in secret, and it wakes up, decides…

The Infinity SagaDisney+76%Released
Avengers: Age of Ultron poster art

The story

The Avengers raid Strucker's HYDRA base, recover Loki's scepter and discover the Mind Stone inside it. Tony and Bruce use it to finish a global defence AI in secret, and it wakes up, decides humanity's problem is the Avengers, and builds itself a body out of the internet.

Ultron's plan is extinction by asteroid: lift a chunk of Sokovia into the sky and drop it. The more durable material is around the edges — Wanda and Pietro's radicalisation, Vision's birth, and Tony's fear metastasising into the doctrine that splits the team in the next film.

Key facts

Release date
1 May 2015
Status
Released
Phase
Phase 2
Saga
The Infinity Saga
Runtime
141 min
Certificate
PG-13
Director
Joss Whedon
Writers
Joss Whedon
Streaming
Disney+
Timeline placement
2015 — the Battle of Sokovia, roughly a year after The Winter Soldier

Cast

ActorRole
Robert Downey Jr.Tony Stark / Iron Man
Chris EvansSteve Rogers / Captain America
James SpaderUltron
Elizabeth OlsenWanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch
Paul BettanyVision
Aaron Taylor-JohnsonPietro Maximoff / Quicksilver
Andy SerkisUlysses Klaue

Characters

Hulk poster art

Hulk

Robert Bruce Banner

Ultron poster art

Ultron

Ultron (originally Ultron-1)

Easter eggs

  • Wakanda and vibranium are named for the first time in the MCU, and Klaue loses the arm that becomes his sonic prosthetic in Black Panther.
  • The mid-credits scene shows Thanos claiming the empty Infinity Gauntlet and declaring he will do it himself.
  • Stan Lee cameos as a WWII veteran at the Avengers party who insists on trying Thor's thousand-year-old Asgardian liquor and is carried out.
  • Tony's anti-Hulk contingency armour is nicknamed Veronica — a joke about Betty Ross, Bruce's comic love interest.
  • Thor's vision in the Nornheim cave lays out all six Infinity Stones and was heavily trimmed; the deleted extended version circulated separately.
  • Vision lifts Mjolnir casually and hands it to Thor, a direct nod to the comics where the synthezoid is deemed worthy.
  • Ultron quotes Pinocchio's 'I've Got No Strings', which Whedon planted in the first teaser as the film's thesis.
  • Helen Cho's regeneration cradle technology reappears in Black Panther and Falcon and the Winter Soldier as Wakandan-adjacent medicine.

Trivia

  • Joss Whedon publicly described the production as the hardest experience of his career and left Marvel immediately afterwards.
  • James Spader performed Ultron via full facial and body motion capture as well as voice, and the character's design was mapped to his expressions.
  • A substantial Doctor Strange reference and much of Thor's cave sequence were cut, which Whedon cited as his biggest regret.
  • The Seoul chase made it one of the first Hollywood blockbusters to shoot extensively in South Korea, with the city's cooperation.
  • Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen had played a married couple in Godzilla the previous year before being cast as twins.
  • Elizabeth Olsen worked with a dialect coach to build the Sokovian accent, which the character later loses entirely.
  • The Hulkbuster Johannesburg fight was the film's most expensive sequence and required a full digital city block.

Box office

Budget
$365 million
Worldwide
$1.403 billion
Domestic
$459.0 million

Reviews

Critics

76%

Exceedingly ambitious and often thrilling, Avengers: Age of Ultron serves as a jam-packed bridge to the next phase of the Marvel universe.

The MarvelGossips verdict

You can hear the franchise machinery grinding in every scene, and it is still a better film than its reputation. Spader's Ultron is a genuinely funny, genuinely sad villain that the plot never gives room to. The Sokovia evacuation is the moment Marvel started worrying, correctly, about collateral damage.

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Frequently asked

Where does the Mind Stone end up?
In Vision's forehead. Ultron builds a synthetic body around it, the Avengers seize it, and Thor uses lightning to complete Vision — which makes Vision Thanos' final target in Infinity War.
Does Quicksilver stay dead?
In the main timeline, yes. Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Pietro dies in Sokovia. WandaVision's 'Fietro' is Evan Peters playing an imposter named Ralph Bohner, not a resurrection.
Why does Age of Ultron mention Wakanda?
It is the seed for Black Panther. Klaue's vibranium theft, his branded shoulder and the severed arm all pay off three years later, and the film establishes vibranium as the MCU's rarest metal.
What was cut from the film?
Whedon has said his assembly ran well over three hours. The most-discussed excisions are an extended Thor cave sequence explaining the Stones and material developing Wanda and Pietro's Sokovian backstory.
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