An Exclusive First Look at the Superheroes Uniting for 'The Marvel Experience'

It might be a while before we see Iron Man, Captain America, and their Avenger brethren sharing the big screen with fellow Marvel superheroes Spider-Man and Wolverine… if that ever happens at all. That’s because Disney currently owns the film rights to Marvel’s The Avengers, while Sony claims Spider-Man and Fox keeps its claws on Wolverine/X-Men. Getting all those studios to collaborate could be a gargantuan, if not impossible, task.

Spidey and Wolverine will assemble with The Avengers, however, in the upcoming interactive tour The Marvel Experience, and we’ve got an exclusive look at how all 13 originally designed heroes will look in animated form above. In addition to Iron Man, Cap, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, Spider-Man and Wolverine, the lineup also features recognizable characters like S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Nick Fury and Maria Hill, as well as heroes who have yet to appear on screen: The Vision (who will debut in Avengers: Age of Ultron), Iron First (who will be the subject of a Netflix series next year), and fan favorites Black Panther and She-Hulk (both of whom are still trying to lock up movie deals).

“This is the only place you’ll see them together, and we’re proud of that,” says Rick Licht, CEO of Hero Ventures, the entertainment company behind the tour. Licht and his team take special pride in The Vision, especially, having locked him in for The Marvel Experience before it was announced the character would play an pivotal part of next summer’s Age of Ultron. “We had him first,” Licht says laughing. “We wanted him all to ourselves.”

The Marvel Experience, which kicks off Dec. 12 in Scottsdale, Arizona, is a fully interactive and immersive event that will be held in an interconnected layout of seven massive tented domes across two acres, and includes a 4D motion ride as well as 20-plus minutes of original 3D animation featuring the aforementioned characters. “It’s a projection-heavy show with feature-film quality animation,” explains Hero Ventures’ COO, Doug Schaer, adding that the narrative will play out in a series of three-to-four minute sequences.

Fans will be introduced to the storyline in the first dome by Nick Fury, who explains the task at hand via a debriefing: Classified data has been stolen by a Super-Adaptoid, and that intel ends up in fragments strewn around North America, leading S.H.I.E.L.D. and Stark Industries to construct this series of sophisticated domes in your city for excavation. The story then advances and expands to include all our heroes once it moves into the main attraction, a 20,000-square feet dome.

A model of The Marvel Experience domes revealed at New York Comic-Con (Hero Ventures)

“We wanted to take all these characters and weave them into a story that was dynamic, was feature-film quality, and had depth and complexity to it, which is a hallmark of Marvel,” Schaer says. “There’s nothing simple in the Marvel universe. You don’t find flat, generic, formulaic stories.” Licht says this narrative will sync up with what we’ve seen the characters who have made movie appearances recently do on the big screen: “We didn’t want to do a disservice to where they are now,” he explains. “We can’t be parallel towers when they’re ascending and we’re coming up with a story that barely matches what everyone’s come to expect from Marvel.”

Hero Ventures did want to extend its reach beyond the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “We tried to pull characters and heroes and villains from kids’ shows, from movies, things that they are doing on Netflix, from comic books, from all the different touch points that Marvel has,” says Schaer.

Another goal was diversity: “We want to make sure we’re being representative of our target audiences, fans. There’s a lot of old-school characters, and a lot of newer-school characters, too,” Schaer adds. “We want to make sure we have something for everyone.”

Tickets are now available for The Marvel Experience in the following cities:

Scottsdale, Arizona: Dec. 12, 2014 – Jan. 3, 2015

Dallas, Texas: Jan. 9 – Feb. 1

San Diego/Del Mar, California: Feb. 7 – Feb. 22

San Francisco, California: Feb. 27 – March 22