Ever since Warner Bros. officially announced itsJustice Leaguemovie in October 2014, many had wondered how similar this superhero ensemble would be toMarvel’s The Avengers, which broke box office records in the summer of 2012. Now thatJustice Leagueis finally here, it didn’t take long for one enterprising viewer to point out all of the similarities between thisDCEUsuperhero ensemble and the MCU ensemble from five years ago. As it turns out, there are many more than you may think, which may not be terribly surprising considering that Joss Whedon worked on both movies.
While Joss Whedon did not get a directing credit for his work on the reshoots, after director Zack Snyder had to leave the project due to a family tragedy,he did get a writing credit, revealing that the filmmaker wrote about two dozen pages of new material while excising a number of other scenes and, when all was said and done, he rewrote roughly one-third of the script. While we’ll likely never know the exact scenes that he wrote, it seems clear that even the earlier versions of the script had plenty ofAvengers"DNA," so to speak, embedded within the pages. While some of these may in fact be just general similarities, some are rather uncanny.
The video opens with the narrator revealing thatJustice League, “bears more than a passing resemblance” to the originalAvengers, which, coincidentally, is still the MCU’s top-grossing movie both domestically ($623.3 million) and worldwide ($1.5 billion). The similarities begin in a rather subtle way, since, in both movies, the planet is “left defenseless” against alien threats after a “God-like character has recently left the planet,” which, inAvengersreferences Thor leaving Earth for Asgard, and inJustice League, it represents the “death” of Superman. Both movies then follow a “villain with a horned helmet,“Avengers' Loki andJustice League’sSteppenwolf, who arrive with the help of a “magic cube” (Tesseract/Mother Box) that each villain then steals to further their villainous agendas.
Both of these cubes have been hiding on Earth for thousands of years, and then a mysterious character (Hulk / Cyborg) comes out of hiding to help find this cube. There are also similarities in the way that both teams recruit the rest of their members. Both teams use a man (Nick Fury and Batman) and a woman (Black Widow andWonder Woman), but the similarities don’t stop there. Each of the men recruit someone with superhuman abilities (Captain America and Aquaman) while the women each recruit characters who, “see themselves as monsters” (Hulk and Cyborg). At the beginning of each movie, the female character is trying to disrupt a military operation, and both movies have characters with experience at war (Captain America and Wonder Woman).
This video also points out the similarities between Marvel’s Iron Man and DC’sCyborg, since they both have heroes which are “integrated with technology” and they both use holograms to look up details on other members of the team, while both possessing “lights that shine through their shirts.” While this “similarity” may be valid, it’s also kind of a stretch, since, aside from the aforementioned similarities, both characters couldn’t be more different. Still, we’ve only mentioned about half of the similarities offered as evidence in this video, fromScreenCrush YouTube, so you can check the full video below.
