17 Actors You Didn't Know Almost Played The Avengers

If David Hasselhoff is evidence of anything in comic book movie making, it's that initial casting decisions aren't always as perfect as the casters might think.

Thankfully, times have changed since the heyday of casting completely inappropriate people in important roles, and now we have solid decisions like Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor... Okay, so maybe the net isn't as tight as it could be, but at least the news that leaks occasionally linking actors to roles they missed out on proves that there is a little more due diligence in the process. Otherwise this would be the world where Bill Murray had played Batman, or Tom Selleck for that matter.

It is of course invariably entertaining to read that an actor bailed on a potentially career making movie or TV show to concentrate on a project that comically bombed. These people are Hollywood's tragic fools, who turned down or missed out on solid gold success, and the comic book movie genre has an incredible number of these nearly men.

With Avengers: Age Of Ultron about to land in cinemas, it's now an appropriate time to look at the actors who could have shaped the universe in a very different way. These particular nearly men are the faces who were almost behind the capes and cowls, and they deserve to be saluted for how close they came to being genre legends...