By: Russ Burlingame on July 3, 2012
Since it was announced that Marvel would release another short film on the Blu-Ray for The Avengers, this one titled “Item 47,” fans have wondered what the heck that item might be. Well, thanks to Entertainment Weekly, it looks like we’ve got our answer. In a new first-look still from the short, the magazine features Lizzy Caplan holding one of the guns left behind by the vanquished Chitauri in the wake of the film’s action-packed finale.
EW says that Caplan and Jesse Bradford “star as a down-on-their-luck couple who find one of the discarded alien guns from the finale to The Avengers — and proceed to make some incredibly bad decisions” in the short, which was directed by Marvel Studios co-president Louis D’Esposito. Whether Item 47 is the gun itself or something rolled out by S.H.I.E.L.D. to recover or combat it, it seems likely the image at right is key to solving the mystery.
“The world is topsy-turvy now. There’s been an alien invasion, and things are crazy,” D’Esposito told Entertainment Weekly. “So when this gun literally fell into their lap, this is a sign: We’re going to rob a few banks, we’re going to buy a boat, we’re going to the Caribbean, and all our problems will be solved.”
Of course, that’s not how it plays out, as a pair of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are dispatched to bring the two to justice and bring back the gun. The troubled couple, though, doesn’t want to surrender and go back to being nothing.
“Anything that expands the world and shows you the more human elements of it, that just makes the world more colorful and fun for the average viewer,” Eric Pearson, who wrote the screenplay for Item 47 (as well as the previous two One-Shots: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor’s Hammer and The Consultant) told the magazine.
The Avengers comes out on Blu-Ray in September, but Item 47 is one of a number of Marvel-related items that have been rumored as a potential gift to convention-goers at next week’s Comic-Con International. Besides the short film, an Ant-Man test reel and footage from Iron Man 3 are among the things fans are hoping might pop up at the giant pop-culture convention.
