Marvel Entertainment announced that James Spader had been cast as the titular supervillain in the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron. If you're new to the stylish robot scourge of the Marvel Universe—no, not the Sentinels; this is a different robot scourge — never fear: We're here to walk you through some of the key points of the killer 'bot's backstory, and how it might tie in to the new movie.
Ultron is a legacy supervillain: He's been wreaking havoc in the Marvel Universe since the late sixties, accumulating the kind of retroactive continuity and time-travel laced rap sheet that gives migraines to Marvel Comics readers. It's also worth noting that when I say "Ultron," I actually mean about fifteen different robots named Ultron, because when you fight the Avengers as much as Ultron does, you go through chassis pretty fast. Add on a penchant for frequent upgrades and extending his consciousness into hive-mind robot armies, and there have been a lot of Ultrons.
Ultron — the original Ultron, at least — has the usual evil robot origin story. Dr. Hank Pym (aka Ant-Man, Giant-Man, or Yellowjacket, depending on how stable he was at the time) was experimenting with high-level artificial intelligence, and decided it would be a great idea to build a robot with a personality imprinted from his own brain patterns.
Pym's defining story arcs have included split identities, multiple emotional breakdowns, and a brief flirtation with wife-beating, so that experiment worked out about as well as you'd expect: Ultron rebelled, surprising no one. After a few decades of trying to kill his creator and sporadically stalking Pym's lady-friend, Janet Van Dyne (the Wasp), he finally decided to think bigger by branching out to the world-domination racket, which he's been doing with varying degrees of success ever since.
Although Ultron goes out of his way to reject his human roots, he's never stopped being defined by them, like a rebel teen who runs away only to end up a mirror image of the parents he rejected. He's not only tried to mimic the Avengers' family structures with the numerous robot "wives" and "brothers" he's created over the years; he's actually incorporated multiple Avengers' brain patterns into them. Appropriately, several of those creations ended up defying Ultron to join the Avengers, just as Ultron himself defied Pym.
For comics writer Kurt Busiek, who scripted the now-iconic Avengers storyline "Ultron Unlimited," the villain's familial connections to the Avengers are key to his enduring appeal. "I've always thought of Ultron as one of the top two Avengers villains (the other being [time-traveling despot] Kang)," the writer told WIRED. "It's the whole extended-family thing — it's not just that he's a great-looking psychotic robot, but that he's got so many personal connections to the Avengers. Every time Ultron shows up, it's big, it's dangerous, and it's personal, because Ultron's part of the family. Not a nice part, but that's how it works with families — you don't get to choose all your relatives."
The Ultron you'll see in Avengers: Age of Ultron will diverge significantly from the one in the comics, however. While the movie shares its title with a recent comics crossover, director Joss Whedon has confirmed that two stories are unconnected. Whedon has also confirmed that Hank Pym will not be part of the movie, which means someone else will need to create Ultron. Right now, smart money is on Tony Stark: he's the robotics genius of the current lineup, and Ultron has been known to possess and occasionally rebuild himself from Iron Man armor. Furthermore, the time *Iron Man 3 * spent playing with themes of identity and artificial intelligence set Stark up neatly for an eventual betrayal by his own creation.
Busiek is optimistic: "If there's anyone who's good at forging emotional connections, it's Joss Whedon, so I expect he'll find good and effective ways of building that kind of relationship."
