Well, I don't know about you, but I wasn't expecting that.
At San Diego over the weekend, Joss Whedon and Marvel announced the title of the Avengers sequel, and in the process, named the villain of the piece, and it wasn't who we were expecting. It isn't Thanos, as Avengers teased. And it won't be The Collector, as the Guardians of the Galaxy film has been setting up. It will be Ultron, and the film will be called Age of Ultron, sharing a title with a recent comic from Marvel, but not sharing any of the content, continuing Marvel's films tendency not to directly adapt any specific storyline.
For those unfamiliar, Ultron was a humanoid robot created by Ant-man Hank Pym, who developed sentience, learned to hate his father, love his "mother," the Wasp, and himself created the future Avenger Vision. First appearing in 1968, Ultron is one of the Avengers chief, and longest serving villains. And all of this presents problems, because Hank Pym won't be introduced until Edgar Wright's Ant-man, which will be released six months after Avengers: Age of Ultron. Said Whedon,
"We’re doing our own version of the origin story of Ultron. The other thing is, in the origin story, there was Hank Pym. So a lot of people assumed that he was going to be in the mix, but he’s not. Because we’re basically taking the things from the comics for the movies that we need and can use. A lot of stuff has to fall by the wayside."It doesn't discount using Ultron to introduce Pym as a hook for Phase 3, though the logical new origin would be through the machine shop at Stark Industries. Iron Man 3 already featured a largely autonomous suit, and has featured a nearly sentient AI throughout the series in Jarvis. It makes for a natural evolution for Tony Stark to start developing technologies along those sorts of lines now that he is suit free himself, and would play into his character arc of wanting to remove people from danger, by having drone suits work at a distance. What Ulton's introduction does do is present the very real possibility that Vision might be introduced by film's end, and considering the Vision and Scarlet Witch's long standing romance, might play part of the connective tissue for her character's involvement, or at least set up a plot for future films.
Whedon went on to say that he requested that Marvel use Ultron as the villain in the sequel before the first film began production, whether he was involved in the project or not. He also confirmed that the film will be a global one, be more science fiction-y then the original, which was already pretty high on the sci-fi content, what with wormholes, alien invasions and all. And he confirms, despite rumours that Jeremey Renner might not be returning for the sequel, that the character of Hawkeye will have a larger role in the sequel.
Via Collider.