The title of the thread doesn't make sense, I just like meaningless wordplay — I think Spader was awesome in this movie. Whatever.

Anyway, I liked it plenty, insofar as anybody can like one of these things. More than anything else, I continue to be meta-impressed by the Whedonvengers films, in terms of how deftly they navigate forty thousand bullshit hurdles and still manage to be anything other than absolute torture.

Warning: the rest of this is just a half-cocked rant. There's a tl;dr.

My main thought is that Avengers 3, or any major all-hands-on-deck Avengers follow-up that happens while the franchise is still this hot, has no chance on Earth of being even kind of okay. Not that Joss is infallible, I just think he happens to be the one motherfucker that history will look back on and say "yeah, I guess Joss was the only person who ever had a reasonable chance of doing this job well."

Basically, I arrive at that thought by pitting two conditions against each other — first, someone getting the job and the freedom to do it the way it has to be done... and then, that person doing that job well.

First, I can't think of anyone on Earth who stands a snowball's chance of getting hired to write / direct Avengers 3 and being given the kind of reign a director almost has to be given in order to tie a movie together out of it. Like, anybody — any other human on Earth being given that amount of freedom and responsibility. Only Kevin Feige himself, maybe, might be able to get that amount of responsibility, once. Everyone else — name a director, even a huge director — is going to be backseat-driven like a motherfucker by an impossible number of interests and cooks in the kitchen. I think they got Joss for Avengers out of terror and he demanded enough freedom, and then after Joss was the guy who directed global-smash-hit The Avengers, he got the same freedom on Avengers 2 because by then he happened to have made one of the highest-earning films of all time.

That explains how somebody got that job, and just enough freedom to do it well, once. That happened once, with Whedon, when he did his Avengers movies. That can happen to one guy, one time. Now that he's going off on a well-earned permanent fuckthatshit-cation, I don't think anyone else ever gets that same deal. It's too big now. I don't think anybody else ever even really gets close to having that particular set of conditions. I think whoever gets saddled with Avengers 3 and 4 is going to be micro-managed to the bone, and that's assuming that they hire someone who they only feel like they have to minimally micro-manage.

So there's that, Joss was able to get enough rope to hang himself with, and I don't think anyone else ever gets that much rope. Secondly, imagine someone does get that much rope — and like I said, literally the only person I can imagine being able to inherit that much auteur-power over an Avengers movie is Kevin Feige himself, who isn't a director — and now they have the exact same opportunity Joss had.

Well, the other half of this shit is that Joss happens to be, like, custom-built for exactly this series of impossible writing challenges. You also have to be Joss-Whedon-level-good to write one of these movies, given the myriad arbitrary requirements of corporate franchise-dom and also juggling like twenty-five leads in a bullshit cartoon apocalypse, and who else is on that level as a writer in this genre? If you can even think of someone, which... eh, maybe you can think of someone, but I really don't think so, Joss is sort of magically-qualified when it comes to this challenge... okay, sure, but: is that person given the rope to hang themselves with?

Has that person somehow demonstrated to Disney and Marvel that they can land a billion dollar movie with their eyes closed and should thusly be given complete trust and freedom to direct the movie the way their instincts are telling them to direct it?

Of course not. That's psychotic. That person will receive exactly enough respect and responsibility so they don't walk out of a meeting and go bomb Disneyland in a fit of rage, and no more. The rest of the responsibility will be diffused among ten writers, twenty producers, half a dozen executives and a few actors, because... frankly, that bet is like nine times safer.

The idea that these first couple of Avengers movies would contain like an hour of good stuff between the other hour and a half of giant fuck-all set pieces is a totally arbitrary one. These movies would still make start-a-new-country money if they completely sucked. They don't have to not-suck.

Anyway. I don't actually care about any of this, it's just a thought I was turning over in my head last night.

So, yeah. Avengers!

tl;dr — I don't think there's much of a chance that we'll get another good-ish "Assemble" movie. I think you need to already be Joss Whedon, and then be the beneficiary of a very singular arrangement of benefit-of-the-doubt, to even stand a chance.