The Avengers

The Avengers (2012) is Marvel's super-team blockbuster, free to watch online on iFILM. Loki rips a portal open over New York and lets an alien army pour through. Stopping them falls to a group of heroes who can barely stand one another.

S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury pulls the team together. Armored billionaire Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), thawed-out soldier Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), the thunder god Thor (Chris Hemsworth), spy Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), archer Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), and physicist Bruce Banner, who turns into the Hulk when his temper snaps (Mark Ruffalo). Every ego is the size of a planet, so they spend half the film fighting each other while Loki (Tom Hiddleston) quietly sets his invasion in motion. Keeping the team from falling apart turns out harder than beating the aliens.

Joss Whedon folded the leads of five separate films into one story and found a way to give each of them a moment without burying the rest. The Battle of New York, with its flying Chitauri leviathans, was among the most expensive action sequences of its day, and the movie pulled in over 1.5 billion at the box office while locking in the template for the entire Marvel universe. Stream The Avengers (2012) online on iFILM.