10 Mega-Successful Blockbusters Everyone Expected To Fail

2. The Avengers

If Iron Man was Marvel testing the waters with their extensive, if completely un-mainstream, back-catalogue, The Avengers was them going all in. Ensemble movies are hard. Cross-over movies are nigh-on impossible. And Marvel were trying it with a bunch of characters audiences were only just getting acquainted with. It wasn't that it couldn't be good. It's just there were so many opportunities for it to go wrong. For fans the big question was whether they'd be able to pull it off convincingly. The quality of superhero movies varied wildly and the young studio didn't have the perfect track record, while the geek-friendly director choice Joss Whedon was totally unproven in feature films (Serenity was far from mainstream blockbuster). The Avengers couldn't just put the characters all on screen together and just be done with it. And on the financial side the box office predictions were hard to gauge. Following the disappointing Iron Man 2 the box office takings for the series had been decreasing - still in profit, but not the levels of the original Iron Man. With the ever-present question of the superhero bubble bursting looming large, could the slew of unfamiliar characters be beginning to wear audiences down? The ultimate success when the film arrived was two-fold. The company had given their characters enough time to enter the popular consciousness, while the simple fun of the film meant people kept coming back for more. In a year when the sequel to The Dark Knight was arriving The Avengers flew, leaped and hammer-jumped ahead of the competition.