Thoughts on Bendis' Avengers

[Ultimate Captain America]

I'm sure that The Ultimates was just as much a selling point for studios. Clearly parts of Avengers 2012 is inspired by The Ultimates, it often felt like the movie was an Ultimates one but the characters personalities taken from the classic versions. Still I think part of that was seeing that work in Bendis' version.

In fact if they do another Avengers movie I actually would like to see it take inspiration for its roster from New Avengers. I'd love for Spider-Man to officially join the team and given that a lot of X-Men fans don't like Logan dominating their movies it'd be cool to have him in The Avengers instead in costume for the first time and with a bunch of other solo stars he'll play off them rather than overshadow them like he often did in the X movies. I'd love for acknowledgement of the Netflix series with Luke Cage as a member but I imagine that's unlikely and we'd get Black Panther instead alongside Sam Wilson and Carol Danvers

Actually, Millar reinvented the Avengers by using a cinematic narrative style, instead of the classic comic book style, but it was just a creative thing. Back in 2002, nobody actually thought that the Avengers would be actual cinematic material. The MCU would not be started until years later, and even then the initial brainstorming (before settling for the Phase 1 films) suggested properties with little or no relation to the Ultimate line, such as Ant-Man, Shang-Chi, Luke Cage, Runaways (if I remember fine), etc.

I stand by what I have always said about his run. It was lazy. He was given ALL the toys to play with like no other writer ever had in the history of Marvel. ANYONE could have sold the same numbers he did with all the A++++ characters he was allowed to use. He wanted Wolverine and Spider Man he got them. Character had a movie coming up he grabbed that character for his team. Bendis is the ultimate opportunist when it comes to grabbing on to whats hot.

That didn't happen from out of the blue. Bendis first wrote "Ultimate Spider-Man", a comic set in an alternate universe, so if he failed (as Chapter One failed before it) it would have been canceled and nobody would had noticed. But it did not fail, and instead it outsold the main Spider-Man comics. So yes, of course that he was promoted to write the mainstream universe comics as well. But "hot"... the Avengers were not "hot" back then, they were a cult classic at best, a minor and irrelevant comic at worst (just check if Chuck Austen's Avengers were "hot"). It was Millar with the Ultimates and Bendis with his run, who made the Avengers hot. Then the film based on the Ultimates made the Avengers real-world hot, and the rest, as they say, is history.