UPDATED: This ‘Avengers: Age Of Ultron’ Trailer Features Jo’burg Preeeetty Prominently, You Guys

Why, look what city the Avengers Age of Ultron trailer features rather prominently in its opening shot and beyond. Not New York City. Not LA. Not Paris. Not London. It’s Joburg, you guys. Ponte, Hillbrow Tower and all. Beyond that though, does the trailer actually look any good? Well…

This trailer was originally set to debut next week, after episode 6 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. but someone went ahead and did us the favor of leaking it all over the internet last night instead. Now we can throw around supposition and theory a full week before Marvel intended, and we can do so with the knowledge that our hometown of Jo’burg is all over this trailer, and yet most people outside of here probably have no clue that’s what they’re looking at. Who cares? This is our little South African gem we can covet like it’s the One Ring.

The Hulk’s gonna trash the Father City anyway.

UPDATE: Marvel had originally intended to release this teaser next week, and so the versions doing the rounds online were pretty low-res. Rather than respond to the leak with a sweeping dismissal, they opted to release the trailer at high quality so we can get a good look at the boets in blue doing their thing.

From what I can gather, between the trailer and earlier rumors, Avengers 2‘s plot centres around Tony Stark creating Ultron, a robot who is the Avengers’ worst enemy in the comics, to help the heroes defeat their enemies. And then the robot goes nuts and sends Iron Man’s various armors on a global rampage to discredit the heroes (hence the Hulk’s fight in Jozi), which is why they all look so shaken at the start of that trailer. Of course this means the movie’s second (and probably third) act might cover relatively similar ground to the stuff we saw in the first Avengers movie, a film that I think only I thought was only merely okay as far as superhero movies go. Whatever the case, that one shot of the team on their plane, looking despondent is a very Joss Whedon-esque moment. He likes to tear his casts down before sending them out with renewed vigor for the final battle, and he usually does it well too.

And if there’s a similarity in story, I’d say this movie’s actually has a little more in common with some of what was in his work on the Astonishing X-Men comics from the mid-2000s, in which an evil robot fought the X-Men to a standstill, and those books were phenomenally fun and entertaining reads. In other words, while I’m not sure Age of Ultron will be the gold that everyone no doubt already believes it will be, I am kinda looking forward to it more than I thought I’d be. Maybe seeing the Hulk and Iron Man’s Hulkbuster armor duke it out on the streets of midtown Jo’burg helped?