Avengers director Joss Whedon has explained how he plans to unify the narrative for The Avengers, the first mega-budget superhero team-up movie, which brings disparate heroes (not a cohesive band like the pre-Schism X-Men) together to fight an overarching menace.  Whedon’s Avengers, which debuts on May 4th and already has some analysts predicting that it will be a Dark Knight-scale hit.

Whedon told Entertainment Weekly: “I set out with a very simple problem.  There is no reason for these people to be in the same movie.  So that’s what my movie has to be about.  So much of the movie takes place from Steve Rogers’ (Captain America played by Chris Evans) perspective, since he’s the guy who just woke up and see’s this weird-ass world. Everyone else has been living in it.”

While it doesn’t necessarily mean that Captain America is the film’s dominant hero, he does evidently get about the same amount of screen time as the film’s other heroes, which include Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, Nick Fury and Hawkeye.  But by molding the screenplay from his “man out-of-time” point of view and by preserving Cap’s leadership role in the Avengers from the comics, Whedon hopes to unify the film’s sprawling focus and narrative.