How Marvel Studios brought Avengers together - New York Daily News

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Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Captain America (Chris Evans) join forces, along with other Marvel heroes, in 'The Avengers.'

Jeremy Renner wondered what he had gotten himself into. Weeks before the cameras began rolling on “The Avengers,” the actor found himself in a stunt dojo on the film’s Albuquerque, N.M., set with his co-star Chris Hemsworth swinging on wires high overhead.

Around the same time, he watched an enormous stuntman, clad in a green, bubble-wrap "Hulk" suit, lumber by.

Renner had been around movie shoots for a long time but had never seen anything like this.

“I was in training, watching Hemsworth flying around with his wire, coming smack down on the shield of a stunt guy â€" which was actually a trash can lid,” says Renner, who plays the titular team’s archer, Hawkeye. “This is happening in this big stunt gym and he’s flying around. I’m doing these stunts with Scarlett [Johansson], rolling around shooting arrows.

“I’m like, ‘This is really weird, this is really happening.’ ”

“The Avengers,” opening Friday, is indeed really happening. All that training was just part of one of the most ambitious summer blockbusters of all time, and the culmination of a plan hatched by Marvel Studios five years ago.

Joss Whedon, who makes up for a lack of big-budget experience with geek cred for creating “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” was tasked with directing the film, which is built on top of four other franchises.

He’d been training for the job for a long while.

“I was playing with the Hulk and Thor action figures when they were still called dolls and I was 14,” says Whedon.

The story of “The Avengers” appropriately seems ripped from the panels of a comic book: It opens with Thor’s brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) threatening the human race with a powerful ancient weapon and an alien armada.

In response, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and his government agency, S.H.I.E.L.D., round up a team of superheroes to defend Earth. On hand are Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), the billionaire playboy armed with high-tech battle armor; Captain America (Chris Evans), the World War II “super soldier” coming out of a seven-decade deep freeze; Thor (Hemsworth), wielder of lightning; an uncontrollable rage monster known as the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo); Black Widow (Johansson), a martial arts expert and spy; and Hawkeye, deadly with his bow.

The resulting adventure culminates in one of the largest battle scenes in summer blockbuster history, an epic throw-down in the middle of Manhattan (shot mostly in stunt doubles Cleveland and New Mexico).

Just like the supergroup created by comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the early 1960s (with the exception of Captain America, who was created by Kirby and Joe Simon more than 20 years earlier), the superheroes are a band of dysfunctional loners who spend more time battling each other than their enemies.