‘The Avengers’: The Sean Connery flop compared to “listening to Stalin on crack”
When the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s superhero crossover hit cinemas in 2012, its title was ever-so-slightly altered to Marvel Avengers Assemble in the United Kingdom, just in case anybody was going to get it confused with the Sean Connery-starring failure that had disgraced the big screen in 1998.
Quite why the powers-that-be thought anybody would get the two confused is entirely up for debate, with the adaptation of the popular 1960s TV series, The Avengers, hardly being a film that lingers long in the memory. In fact, it’s entirely deserving of being labelled as one of the worst big-budget blockbusters ever made, such is the way it scraped the bottom of the cinematic barrel with such alarming regularity.
On paper, the cast can’t be faulted, with Connery’s villainous Sir August de Wynter battling against Ralph Fiennes’ John Steed and Uma Thurman’s Emma Peel, with support coming from a solid ensemble that numbers Jim Broadbent, Fiona Shaw, Eddie Izzard, Carmen Ejogo, and Keeley Hawes.
The alarm bells were ringing well ahead of release, though, with Warner Bros refusing to screen the movie in advance for critics, which is a sign of a dismal feature if ever there was one. Behind-the-scenes disagreements saw the original 115-minute cut butchered to a breezy 89 minutes, which in turn rendered much of the story developments and character beats completely nonsensical and without reason or logic.
To the surprise of nobody, The Avengers tanked after failing to recoup its budget at the box office. It ended up notching nine nominations from the Golden Raspberry Awards, including ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, and ‘Worst Screenplay’, even if it did only end up leaving with one prize for ‘Worst Remake or Sequel’.
The splashy update of a classic episodic espionage adventure clearly aimed to emulate the success of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible. However, the ball wasn’t just dropped but subsequently deflated and then set on fire. Some turds simply can’t be polished under any circumstances. Still, as screenwriter Don Macpherson explained to Yahoo, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing from Warner Bros. as the company desperately tried to salvage a project they knew was doomed to fail.
“It was like listening to Stalin on crack. Crazy shit came out from them. For people to believe that we’d deliberately tried to do a bad, campy movie, or that that’s what they had originally put into production, it beggars belief to me,” Macpherson said, sharing that his original vision was to craft a “dark, stylish European movie” before Warner Bros. decided it would be better served as a summer tentpole.
Unfortunately, the footage wasn’t exactly reflective of a crowd-pleasing blockbuster. It placed The Avengers in dire straits when it was hacked to pieces to make it more palatable to casual viewers. “The marketing department then saw it and was probably furious. ‘We can’t sell this shit in the summer. It’s crazy,” he continued. “They previewed it in the Valley somewhere. And people were saying, ‘What is this shit?”
Admirably, he refused to lay any blame at the feet of director Jeremiah S. Chechik, who “did a great job of doing a version that, by then, was the one that Warners wanted to make”. Still, when The Avengers made its way to multiplexes everywhere, the scribe was forced to concede the response was “kind of a massacre for us”.
