“A sequel like last May’s ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron,’ from Marvel, is less a self-contained film than a loose amalgam of ongoing stories”

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A sequel like last May’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” from Marvel, is less a self-contained film than a loose amalgam of ongoing stories. The film lays track for two future sequels and allots significant screen time to each of the film’s fourteen main characters so they can serve as calendar reminders of forthcoming spinoffs and other ancillary products, including, of course, TV shows. The film is essentially a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar episode of a television drama that airs every few years.

Tad Friend, “The Mogul of the Middle”, The New Yorker (11 January 2016), 46.

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