Avengers Age Of Ultron Preview: Meddle Begets Metal

Today begins the massive stream of Avengers previews, beginning with an image of Ultron himself. This preview is of the flat, image kind, showing off Ultron as a terrifying Iron Man villain-looking fellow. Of course he's powerful enough to take on the whole of the Avengers, so there's a bit more to learn.

He's a robot. Better yet, he's got artificial intelligence the likes of which only Tony Stark could dream up. Unfortunate for him – and the rest of the Avengers, and humanity – he's more akin to CLU from TRON. He's meant to create the perfect system, but his vision of this is not the same as that of his creator.

Tony Stark creates Ultron in this universe – different from the comics, where Ant Man creates him. Here Tony Stark creates Ultron as a means to continue rolling with the Iron Man program without jumping in to the suit himself.

Ultron can control the rest of the Iron Man suites and will likely create an army of his own. They'll be fighting the Avengers hand-to-hand with some radical effectiveness.

Ultron is not necessarily just one being. Ultron is an intelligence that can spread to other machines, not unlike Tony Stark's Jarvis. Also it's quite possible that Jarvis will be the spark and the start for Ultron – time to get evil.

This spread is counter-played by the lack of SHIELD in this episode of the saga. SHIELD has been disbanded – as you'll have seen in a recent film and/or the TV show, effectively making way for The Avengers to sit at center stage. Tony Stark is their bankroll, and Stark Tower is now Avengers Tower.

Straight from the pages of Entertainment Weekly – like these images – comes a note about the outline for The Avengers. Kevin Feige, producer of The Avengers, suggested that "a long time ago when Joss first did his 6-page or 10-page outline for Avengers, there was a lot of work and the movies [have] adapted quite a bit since then, but there were six or seven signature things just in that."

The heroes of this picture appear above. This is Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Chris Evans as Captain America, Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner (The Hulk), Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Quicksilver, and Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch.

Not pictured are Andy Serkis – whose role is yet unknown, Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter, Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill, Paul Bettany as the voice of Jarvis and The Vision, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, and James Spader as the voice of Ultron.

Also making appearances will be Don Cheadle as War Machine and Thomas Kretschmann as Baron Wolfgang von Strucker – appearing as this fellow first in a mid-credits scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. There's also a rumor that BJ Britt will reprise his roll as Antoine Triplett of SHIELD.

Fiege continued, "I said 'Joss, even if we don't do anything else. Just do these seven things, that's enough for the movie. Now let's get to work and put it all together.' Those things are in the movie and are amazing, of which that sequence is one." Fiege speaks of a rumored Hulkbuster armor battle.

The above image you see comes from Radio Times where they suggest they've gotten ahold of a piece of "rare production footage." There's no film to go with it, but we'd certainly not put it out of the realm of possibility.

Next you'll see an image from ScreenRant who caught a clip from ABC behind the scenes at the filming of Avengers Age of Ultron. This image shows a screen test of what would very much appear to be a single arm from the Hulkbuster armor as well.

Below you'll see an early mock-up teaser shown right around a year ago at Comic Con 2013. We'll see a whole lot more sooner than later – stick around the Marvel Comics tag portal right here on SlashGear to check it!