Same Year, Suspiciously Similar Silhouette
It's one of the great coincidences of 2015: two ensemble action movies about heroes assembling to stop a mechanized menace, released within the same twelve months. On one side, Avengers: Age of Ultron, a Tony Stark defense-program-gone-wrong story with a nine-figure budget, motion-capture robots, and a marketing campaign visible from space. On the other, Avengers Grimm, four fairy-tale princesses with storybook weaponry taking on a mirror-shattering sorcerer and his army of hypnotized thralls.
Editorial disclosure, as always: our running bit at Mockbusters.tv is to pretend the scrappy, low-budget film came first and the studio spent a fortune "copying" it. It's a joke. A loving one, but a joke. Nobody actually storyboarded Ultron after watching Rumpelstiltskin sneak through a magic mirror. We just enjoy pretending they did, because the parallels are too fun to leave on the table.
The Case for the Bit
Line them up and the satire writes itself. Ultron is an artificial intelligence convinced that peace requires erasing humanity — a plan with all the subtlety of a fairy-tale villain. Rumpelstiltskin, for his part, shatters a Magic Mirror and drags four princesses into the modern world specifically because he is one. Both movies split their heroes into factions pulling in different directions. Both climax with a scrappy team (one assembled by S.H.I.E.L.D., one raised on bedtime stories) defending a city from an army that answers to a single overconfident mastermind.
