The Avengers 2012
Chris Ryan's pick, and the movie that tested whether solo album, solo album, group album could actually work. Sean argues Joss Whedon is a deconstructionist, better at analyzing a genre than escalating it, and that the film is really eight scenes long, mostly gatherings where six characters work out their relationships to one another rather than a plot moving forward. Whedon wrote a full Braveheart-style monologue for every character, then cut most of them down into one-liners ('Bunch up, Legolas'); the meta-comedy ('What, this, Shakespeare in the park?') and Natasha Romanoff, the character Whedon plainly likes writing the most, are the high points. The 40-minute battle for New York is where both hosts get less generous rewatching it: a post-9/11 city-destruction metaphor the movie can't quite hold, fought against faceless Chitauri nobody has any reason to care about, though Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye gets singled out as the single biggest waste of an actor in the whole MCU. $623 million domestic, $1.5 billion worldwide, 143 minutes, 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, an A+ CinemaScore, and the first Disney-distributed Marvel movie. Agent Coulson's death supplies the one real emotional stake; the two stingers, the Thanos reveal and the shawarma scene, set the template for everything the MCU has done with a credits sequence since.