After watching a bit of the first Avengers movie tonight, it kind of struck me: this is the most ambitious and fairly insane venture in the history of the cinematic medium. The first 10 or so movies in the MCU have been successful, especially considering the first Avengers movie, but to expect 25 or more films, most of which will have a budget of 150 million dollars or so, to all make a return on their investment...it's fairly amazingly ballsy. No one really knows if Benedict Cumberbatch is going to make a Dr. Strange movie actually work, assuming that 20 million people are actually willing to pay to see a Dr. Strange movie. Will people show up to to a Black Panther or a Captain Marvel or an Inhumans movie if they're not familiar with the characters? Can marketing overcome the knowledge shortfall here four or five times in a row? Was Guardians of the Galaxy an outlier or an indicator that Disney's marketing team really knows what they're doing and can keep it up for the next decade?

It's weird. It's totally weird. Disney's making what is maybe the biggest gamble in the history of motion pictures, and they're quite literally betting billions of dollars on something that might not play out. I pretty much love everything they've done with the Marvel Universe so far, but it's easy to see how people might get tired of event comic movies in a year or two. I'm sure there are people at Disney who are taking some nuclear-grade ulcer medicine at the moment as they have to commit the hundreds of millions of dollars to these movies years before they're actually made. Good for them. Life in the movie business is based on risks, and they're doing their best to mitigate or play those risks as they come along.

Anyway: Age of Ultron. I liked that movie. I want to see it again. It was a bit long for my tastes, but I'll pay good money to see it twice before it leaves theaters. That's what I wanted to say here. Here's an image from a Box Office Winner's League that I didn't wind up posting because I was busy.

You and I remember Budapest very differently.