At the beginning of summer 1998, The Avengers was the film I was most looking forward to. The rumors piled up and the allegations of incompetence compounded, but I still refused to believe that such a perfectly cast film that looked so promising could end up faring so poorly (ah, to be young and stupid). Besides, I had actually read an early draft of the script, and I found it to be a dark, violent, and refreshingly complicated action-adventure film. Little did I know that the script that I had read was merely the skeleton. By the time the film came out, it was so lacking in blood and thunder that it needed an random 'f-word' tossed into a climactic fight scene just to avoid a PG rating.
Allegedly spurred by one terrible test screening, Warner Bros hacked out a good 30-45 minutes of the picture, turning a two-hour plus opus into an incomprehensible 84-minute jumble (quite a bit of the running time is spent explaining offscreen events). The film opened on August 14th without press screenings (which was a pretty rare thing for such a major film in those days) and proceeded to make a mere $10 million in its first weekend. The film made just $23 million on a $60 million budget and sits in a bare-bones DVD, a mere piece of random trivia. To this day, there remains no trace of the would-be director's cut and it's unlikely that the film will ever be revisited in any real fashion. Let's take a moment to remember that sometimes the buzz is 100% correct. And, for such a bad film, that film still has one hell of a trailer...
Scott Mendelson
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