The Film
The Avengers (or Avengers Assemble as it’s known in the UK) is one of the best Marvel films, and my personal favorite of the three Avengers releases to date.
It’s stylishly shot, does a great job of combining and balancing its multi-avenger story lines, and milks plenty of laughs from putting so many superheroes in so many rooms together.
Sure, it lacks the weight and scale of Infinity War (reviewed on 4K Blu-ray here). But it has more room to breathe, and it uses that room very effectively to deliver a premium slice of big budget entertainment.
Release details
Studio: Disney/Marvel Studios/Paramount
What you get: All-region 4K Blu-ray, Region A/B/C HD Blu-ray, region-locked Digital download code
Extra Features: Commentary track by director Joss Whedon; 8 deleted and extended scenes; gag reel; two ‘making of’ featurettes’; Soundgarden music video; 11-minute short film from the Marvel universe
Best Soundtrack option: Dolby Atmos
Video options: HDR10
Key kit used for this test: Oppo UDP-203 4K Blu-ray player, Samsung QN65Q9FN TV, Panasonic UB900 4K Blu-ray player
Picture Quality
The first thing to say here is that as with the 4K Blu-ray of Infinity War, The Avengers doesn’t get a Dolby Vision encode. It’s HDR10 only, despite Disney introducing Dolby Vision on the 4K Blu-ray of The Black Panther.
As HDR10 encodes go, though, it’s rather a good one. It’s immediately obvious that the whole dynamic range of the image has been expanded substantially. Black tones look fantastically deep and rich at one end of the light spectrum, while areas of peak brightness – artificial lighting, sun gleaming off faces and metal, the glowing Tesseract and so on – all look dazzlingly bright.
There’s far more extension at both ends of the light range than you get from the HD Blu-ray – despite that Blu-ray being no slouch in the picture department. It turns out, too, that there are many scenes in The Avengers that seem almost tailor made to exploit the gorgeous extra dynamism of the 4K Blu-ray image. The fight outside the museum, the scenes on the bridge of the Shield ship, the shots around New York at night… The HDR hits just keep on coming.
Outdoor scenes also look much more like you’re watching actual daylight than they do on the Blu-ray, thanks to a much higher average brightness level.
Crucially, though, the 4K Blu-ray’s clear expansion and enhancement of the image hardly ever leads to a forced or unbalanced color tone (even during the punchy exterior sequences) or an over-cooked light source. Pretty much everything actually just looks more natural and lifelike than it did in SDR – which is essentially exactly what HDR was designed to achieve. Outstanding.
It’s the same for colors. Every single tone, from the blues and reds of Captain America’s suit and shield to the bright LED displays director Joss Whedon is so fond of looks gorgeously intense and vibrant. Remarkably, even skin tones look more dynamic and emphatic, while hardly ever succumbing to that slight orange push less careful HDR grades can create.
It’s important to add, too, that the excellent HDR and wide color work doesn’t just apply at the extremes of the image. On the contrary, it fleshes out and expands every element of ever frame, for a truly consistent, beautifully three dimensional effect.
The Avengers 4K Blu-ray isn’t quite as effective an upgrade over the Blu-ray where resolution is concerned. Possibly because there’s really nothing truly 4K about the film’s origins (it was largely shot at 2.8K, and only received a 2K Digital Intermediate for its theatrical run), or perhaps because the disc’s HEVC data rate seldom gets above 35Mbps and often hovers more between 10 and 25Mbps.
While it’s not absolutely the most detailed 4K Blu-ray we’ve seen, though, the 4K reworking certainly delivers an obvious and very worthwhile enhancement over the HD Blu-ray.
Large scale shots, for instance, such as those across New York, look genuinely more detailed rather than just sharper. There’s more detail in facial close ups, and you get a new appreciation for the workmanship that’s gone into our heroes’ outfits.
There’s also enough extra sharpness in the image to ruthlessly highlight the (mercifully not too painful) shortcomings in the special effects work, and expose some key props as, well, props. Both Mjolnir and the ‘Tesseract holder’ look frankly hilariously plasticky in the close up shot near the end where Thor holds them both. These effects/prop exposures are, ironically, classic signs of a 4K image that’s clearly, genuinely improving on a 2K one.
Just occasionally very dark parts of the picture can look a little too dark, losing a touch of shadow detail. Overall, though, the strikingly effective 2K upscale in conjunction with the excellent HDR and color work make this one of the most consistently – and unexpectedly – satisfying 4K Blu-ray images I’ve seen.
Sound Quality
This aspect of a 4K Blu-ray’s performance has become something of a tenterhooks moment with Disney 4K Blu-ray releases, thanks to some seriously flawed previous Disney 4K Blu-ray soundtrack work (see this earlier story).
So is The Avengers‘ Dolby Atmos mix another one of those failures? Actually, no. For while it’s not quite a reference grade effort, it certainly doesn’t feel like another horribly compressed mess.
The first sign that we’re on firmer audio ground is the fact that I didn’t feel the need to turn the volume much above my usual reference level (something I have to do with all of Disney’s worst 4K BD mixes).
Then there’s the bass. Yes, bass. This mix genuinely has some. Quite a lot of it, in fact, underpinning massive moments like the early destruction of the underground Shield base with some truly Atmos-like rumbles and low-end expansions. There’s more consistent use of bass ‘whoomps’ to underline major impacts in action scenes, too, than we’ve heard with many Disney releases.
There’s also more aggression and scale in the use of front to back and left to right transitions than we’ve become accustomed to hearing, and vocals are not just clear but also believably contextualized in their environment.
The Avengers mix doesn’t use the Atmos height channels quite as much as it might, and still feels a little light on subtle details and pristine trebles. But let’s be clear about this: while perhaps not a stone-cold classic Dolby Atmos mix, it does at least sound like a proper ‘True HD’ (lossless) Atmos mix rather than some neutered Dolby Digital + (compressed) Atmos mix. Phew.
Extra Features
No extras are found on the 4K Blu-ray – not even Joss Whedon’s commentary track. This commentary track is on the HD Blu-ray that ships with the 4K disc, though, and it’s a pretty good one as it happens. Whedon is chatty and witty, and covers a good range of film-making background information without becoming too bogged down in any particular theme.
Kicking off the other extras on the Blu-ray is a passably entertaining Marvel ‘One Shot’ short (11 minutes) film featuring a pair of bank robbers wielding one of the Marvel Universe’s alien guns. Then there’s a predictably short but sweet gag reel, followed by eight well worth watching deleted and extended scenes which, while rightly cut from the finished film, add either enjoyable extra beats to the Avengers world or, in one case, provide amusing insight into the creation of a special effects-heavy fight scene.
Wrapping up a passable set of extras are two almost insanely rushed ‘making of’ featurettes that run to around 15 minutes total, and a Soundgarden music video.
Verdict
While it’s a shame The Avengers 4K Blu-ray doesn’t carry the film in Dolby Vision, the HDR10 picture is mostly a thing of beauty. Even better, the pristine picture is joined by a Dolby Atmos soundtrack which definitely doesn’t suck. In other words, this is arguably Disney’s all-round most impressive 4K Blu-ray release to date.
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