Ultron 101: Five Things You Need To Know About The Robotic Avengers Villain

By now, every comics and Marvel movie fans has seen the first Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer and dissected it at length. It’s looking extremely promising, and the casting of James Spader as Ultron is already looking like an extremely inspired choice.

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Still, if you aren’t well-versed in Avengers lore, you might be wondering how this evil robot came to be and why he’s been such a dangerous and recurring foe for Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. We all know that Marvel Studios isn’t going to do a straight-up adaptation of any story from the comics for the sequel — indeed, the comics event called Age of Ultron that will likely have nothing to do with the plot of the movie — but there are always some clues in the source material that can grant insight into what we’ll see in theaters.

It’s not easy to boil down a robotic villain who’s made over 100 appearances in the comics and menaced the Avengers for decades into just a few points, but we’ll give it our best shot. Consider this Ultron 101, a beginner’s course in what to know about him before May 2015 rolls around.

Ultron was created by an Avenger

Founding Avenger Hank Pym (known as Ant-Man and Giant-Man, among other code names) has had his share of regrets, but probably none bigger than giving life to Ultron. He started out as an ongoing experiment in robotics and artificial intelligence, but once Ultron gained sentience, one of the first things he did was to make Pym forget he ever created the robot.

Considering that he became one of the team’s most persistent enemies over the years, this has to go down as one of the all time mistakes in the history of the Avengers or super heroes in general. It’s likely to also play out that way in Avengers: Age of Ultron, though with Tony Stark the leading candidate to be substituted for Pym as the “father” of Ultron.

To this point, the Avengers have only been a positive force in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, repelling an alien invasion. Once word gets out that an even greater threat was actually created by one of the heroes, the general public isn’t going to view the team the same way. And to be honest, who could blame them?