Marvel Avengers: a shambles

As you may have already heard, Disney have decided in their infinite idiocy wisdom to change the title of The Avengers: from this point onwards, the film we used to be most excited about is named Marvel Avengers Assemble. I'm sure this makes sense in a parallel universe, but I can't for the life of me figure out how in this one.

Someone at Disney has got a hard-on for changing movie titles. First, they lopped the 'Of Mars' from John Carter (as I said at the time: but that's how you know he's from Mars!) and now, they've changed the UK title of The Avengers, two months before release. The new name? Marvel Avengers Assemble. I'll tell you one thing: the Asylum are going to have to work long and hard to think up a crappier title for their inevitable knock-off.

This is a real head-scratcher for a number of reasons. The official line is that the title was changed in the UK because Disney wanted to avoid confusion with the 60s spy show of the same name - or, more pertinently, the dreadful Uma Thurman-fronted movie revamp of 1998. The Disney spokesmouse has made it clear they were not forced into this move as part of a rights issue by Warner Bros: they did this off their own back.

Here's what I don't get. For this to be true, let's try and picture the kind of person Disney are targeting this title change at. They're worried about potentially confusing people who fall into both of the following categories:

I'm going to put this info into Computron-5000 and scan the UK's population of 70 million people to see how big that market is likely to be. I'm just a rube, I should never question the might of Disney's collective knowledge, maybe I'm wro- hang on, it's done.

Wait. This can't be right. It says '1'.

Only one person in the entire country falls into both of these categories; only one man in the UK would potentially be confused by a movie titled The Avengers. His name is Eric. Here is one of his holiday snaps.


I dare say it would have been less hassle and would have caused far less confusion if Disney had just sent someone round to Eric's flat in Morecambe and explained it to him over a slice of lemon drizzle cake. Now the rest of us have to refer to a film with a superliteral title that makes us sound like excited seven-year-olds when we say it out loud.

Not that that's ever going to happen, of course. No one will refer to it as Marvel Avengers Assemble. People won't even refer to it as Marvel's The Avengers (which, for the record, the would at least have been an understandable revision). That's what's so exhaustively futile about it: as boneheaded a move as it is, it'll make precisely ZERO difference.

Which also makes this post more redundant than usual. Oh well. At least the movie still looks ZOMGnkers. Did I tell you there's a new trailer? That's probably the kind of thing I should mention at the beginning of a post. Dammit, Ali! Remember what you learned at blog school!