In reply to Jumpman.

I think it'd be a big mistake to say that the DC movies are any less of a franchise than the Marvel ones are. I have a hard time believing that Christopher Nolan ever said, "YES! I finally get to make the Bane movie that I've always wanted!" (And for that matter, I'm skeptical that Ra's al Ghul and Scarecrow were first choices, instead of being the only villains left over that weren't already covered in the earlier movies. The fact that he managed to use them to make a solid origin story doesn't say much other than that he's a really good filmmaker).

But I definitely got the feeling that Joss Whedon has been wanting to make an Avengers story for years. I don't know enough about the background to know whether that's true or not, but it sure as hell feels that way. (You got the same feeling from his run on Astonishing X-Men — it seems like his love of these characters is just pouring out of the story).

What you're complaining about is what I think is a big part of why the Marvel movies tend to be better: they never stop being super-hero movies. The directors put their own spin on it (you can see Sam Raimi's sense of humor and pulp horror sensibilities in the first 2 Spider-Man movies, Jon Favreau's sitcom/romantic comedy take on Iron Man, Bryan Singer's X-Men-as-outsiders-and-gay-rights-parable, etc) but they don't try to abandon it.

All the DC movies I can think of, even back to Superman, seem to be trying to step outside of the source material and examine what it is exactly that makes comic books work. Nolan's two Batman movies, while technically great, seem like he's almost begrudgingly taking all the pieces of the Batman franchise and trying to construct a three-part classical hero's journey out of them. But the post-Spider-Man Marvel movies just start with the assumption that people already like comic books, so you don't need to step out of them at all. You can take what already works and make entertaining stories out of them.

(And it's a nit-pick, but I'm extremely skeptical that Robert Downey Jr. was improvising. Joss Whedon writes some of the most natural-sounding dialogue in movies and TV. It's just that he's got a tendency to ruin it by adding too-clever flourishes on top in an attempt to be over-charming. When he reins that in, it's kind of amazing. After seeing scripts for some of his other projects, it wouldn't surprise me at all if every line of dialogue in The Avengers was word-for-word from the script).