Avengers Assembled

Highest opening weekend ever!  Well how about that.  Putting aside my usual quips about the Writer/Director, I'll talk some about The Avengers movie (I'm sorry, Marvel's The Avengers.  Wouldn't want to confuse it with that British TV series or the horrible motion picture based on it.).
All the players are there.  Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Nick Fury, Black Widow, Hawkeye and even the 3rd generation Bruce Banner/Hulk, this time portrayed by Mark Ruffalo.
So, Loki is on the loose and he's got his hands on the "Cosmic Cube" or Tesseract.  He's ready to open a portal to lead an alien army through to Earth and "free humanity from freedom" (paraphrasing), whatever that means.  Nick Fury brings together our heroes to save the world.
The team is pretty dysfunctional at first and there are a lot of arguments and in-fighting but they eventually manage to pull it together to unite against the common enemy.  The actors really bring the dialogue and banter to life and Robert Downey, Jr. manages to steal the scene just about every time he appears on-screen.  He's really nailed the Tony Stark persona.  All the characters manage to get fairly equal screen-time, and the action sequences keep things moving.
Overall, the movie actually does live up to the hype and Marvel just keeps marching forward.  Iron Man 3, which starts shooting within the next month, is slated for 5/3/13, Thor 2 for 11/15/13 and Captain America 2 is down for 4/4/14 (these are confirmed dates from Marvel, though subject to change).  This would probably put a follow-up to The Avengers at May of 2015, if they keep their current release formula.  As for The Incredible Hulk, Marvel has hinted that they may be looking at returning him to the small screen as an on-going series (queue sad, walking away music).  Whether or not they would get Ruffalo to portray him, or yet another actor, remains to be seen.

Other Marvel movie news: The Amazing Spider-man relaunch/reboot is out this summer with a release date for part 2 already announced.  Fox has a "use it or lose it" deal on the X-men and Fantastic Four properties so The Wolverine is in pre-production but no word on the FF other than they want to reboot it as well.  Marvel has also indicated that they would like to bring out some of their lesser known characters in lower budget films, one of which is Doctor Strange which I believe would be interesting (although they did produce a really bad version of him back in the 70's and Paramount/Full Moon Entertainment had a knock-off character called Doctor Mordrid back in the 80's).  There are even a few other characters that are in early development for possible TV shows.  We'll just have to wait and see...