D.C.’s Justice League was released in theaters just over a month ago, and it’s absurdly similar to its Marvel counterpart, The Avengers. Because both movies are near replicas of each other, we are going to look at the better movie, which is hands down Marvel’s The Avengers.
The Avengers is better for a three main reasons, it has a deeper plot with serious long-term implications, it contains better, more fleshed out heroes, and, it’s the still-fresh original! The Avengers wasn’t the one copying off of Justice League, it was the other way around. Marvel’s The Avengers practically came up with the idea for the plot in Justice League in that The Avengers contained an ancient, alien villain who is really working to please a much stronger villain, has an elite alien army, and is after an object(s) of extreme power. D.C.’s Justice League literally copied that plot exactly.
The Marvel movies deeper plot, however, is, at least in my opinion, the main reason that it is the better movie. The plot in The Avengers not only had implications in the movie itself, but also has long term implications for future movies, more specifically 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War, and 2019’s still untitled Avengers Four. The end credits scene of The Avengers introduced fans to the villain Thanos, the villain the Avengers will be facing in both of their upcoming films. The aftermath of The Avengers will in fact be shown in Avengers: Infinity War since, in the trailer, Loki was shown giving the Tesseract (the main artifact in The Avengers) to a mysterious, un-shown figure. Meanwhile, Justice League’s plot could have long term implications since Steppenwolf is working for Darkseid, who is essentially D.C.’s version of Thanos. However, we don’t know for sure whether or not it will since Darkseid has only been referenced once during the course of D.C.’s movies, and hasn’t been shown at all. So, until fans can confidently confirm that Justice League’s plot will have significant long-term implications, we have to say it won’t (and the end credits scene with Lex Luthor is not considered to be part of the plot).
The fact that there are more fleshed out and generally better heroes is the final of the three reasons as to why Marvel’s The Avengers is a better movie than D.C.’s Justice League. Marvel did a good job of crafting out the main characters of the movie well before it was even released with several well-received solo movies which introduced the audiences to all of the main characters in the movie. I feel Justice League rushed the development of it’s characters. In Justice League, only four of the main characters were really introduced before the movie came out (Superman, Wonder Woman, Alfred, and Batman). In previous movies, there was no showing or even mentioning of Steppenwolf, which was unlike how Loki (the main villain in The Avengers) was thoroughly introduced in Thor: God of Thunder. Along with Steppenwolf, the characters Aquaman, The Flash, and Cyborg had never been properly introduced to the audiences. Sure, they were shown briefly in Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, but considering they were main players in this movie, they got practically no screen time prior to the movie when seeing how much the main characters in The Avengers had. I mean, it’s really even debatable to whether or not Batman was properly introduced since Batman V. Superman did such a poor job of it. In my opinion, there were seven main characters in The Avengers, which were Bruce Banner (the Hulk), Captain America, Nick Fury, Loki, Thor, Iron Man, Hawkeye, and Black Widow. Four of those characters had great solo movies, while the others were introduced within the course of at least one of those. Even those who didn’t have solo movies still had more screen time than the quartet of new main characters in Justice League. So, most the characters’ appearances in Justice League just felt too soon, I think most would’ve much rather had them take Marvel’s formula of giving them solo movies before uniting them in Justice League.
All in all, The Avengers is easily the better movie because of a plot with significant implications for upcoming films, characters who weren’t pressed onto the scene, and because it basically contained the original ideas for the Justice League movie.