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Possible and rumored spoilers for Age of Ultron to follow. You've been warned.
Six months ago, I was fifty-fifty about the chances of Maria Hill dying in Age of Ultron. Today, after three variations on the same trailer and various rumors, “rumors”, and reports about the film’s content, I’m guessing the odds are 80-20 against her survival.
I’m not remotely happy about this. With one thing and another, she’s actually my favorite character in this franchise not named Tony Stark. Don’t mistake lightness of tone for enthusiasm.
This prediction also rests on one major assumption: that Ultron will kill somebody when he crashes the Avengers’ party. You know, so the audience will understand this is Serious Business. Now, that prospect is neither certain nor guaranteed, and you certainly don’t have to agree with me about it, but we should all know enough modern entertainment to understand why I’m making it.
So, why am I assuming my second-favorite’s marked for death?
Let’s start with this, which you should click to enlarge for the full effect:
That’s Maria Hill wearing an uncharacteristically bright red dress under the jacket, visual code since time immemorial for LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME. Even Rhodes, in bright but neutral grey and white, is dressed nothing like the other Avengers but blends right into the scenery like he belongs there. Hill’s the only red in the entire scene, and it’s not remotely subtle, and you can’t possibly miss it. In fact, with the picture shrunk down to this size, I would bet that the red of her skirt is among the first things your eyes focus on in the entire shot.
So right off the bat, we’ve got a generally-backgrounded character wearing super-obvious, attention-baiting colors which make her an explicit focus. Does that usually end well for any character in her position?
She’s also the most expendable piggy in the house when Ultron does his big-bad, huff-and-puff routine. Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor are all accounted for in future movies. Bruce Banner, Hawkeye, and Black Widow are all accounted for in footage from later parts of this movie. The mystery woman behind Thor could die, but we know so little about the character, I’m describing her as “mystery woman”, which tells you how big an impact that death would have on the audience.
You know which characters aren’t accounted for anywhere in the materials after this? Rhodes and Hill, the two people who stick right out among all of the other Avengers.
You know which one of those two isn’t a superhero with decades of comics lore at their back? Maria Hill.
You might notice you don’t see Rhodes or Hill's names on this rack of costumes for every other good guy known to be in the movie, either, and that’s including Nick Fury. Now, that picture could just be (and probably is) the costumes set aside for a specific day or two of shooting, and neither Rhodes nor Hill were required.
Of course, since they’re both highly capable People of Action themselves, you have to wonder why they weren’t. Devin Faraci of Badass Digest has said Rhodes is really only in the movie for this scene, and combined with Rhodes’ history as a significant supporting player with a lot of screen time and personal association with Tony Stark, you’d think that makes him a pretty good choice to snuff.
But Faraci has also said that “War Machine” was, as of the leaked script draft which most of the big movie-nerd sites have apparently read, heading off with Captain America at the end to do the Stark-free Avengers thing heading into Civil War. And this suggests that even Rhodes has a future purpose which has been charted out. (*)
(*) Or there’s a switcheroo going on. More on this unlikely possibility shortly.
Absolutely nothing like this has ever been said or hinted at by anybody on the subject of Maria Hill.
If only there were some other hints we might be able to use to take a guess about who’s in the line of fire. There are? Oh, well, all right, then.
Here’s Maria Hill cocking a gun while Ultron’s monologuing, or so we can presume based on the latest trailer. (The second half of that shot, the wary over-her-shoulder glance, is the one selected for the header of the post.) So now we have a non-powered, not-considered-to-be-an-Avenger with tertiary screen time wearing a color which sets her apart and draws our attention while she’s preparing to start some shit against the supervillainous threat of the movie.
In fact, ask yourself where her hands are in the big party shot as she’s standing up and turning to face Ultron with everybody else. While they’re all staring in shock, she seems to be trying to hide her gun up her jacket sleeve until an opportune moment presents itself. (I don’t want to say she’s too smart to use a gun on an Ultron; Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. dropped her IQ twenty points, easy, between thinking a professional commander of agents would draw porcupines on agents’ evaluations and the entire miserable Talbot stunt.)
Thing is, standing up never works out very well for the non-titled heroes in modern superhero movies. Whether it’s the black-tie S.H.I.E.L.D. dudes getting stomped by Obadiah Stane, the random S.H.I.E.L.D. people being led to slaughter because they listened to Cap’s speech in The Winter Soldier, Coulson getting got by Loki in The Avengers, any of the cops in The Dark Knight Rises, or even to a lesser extent Happy Hogan dealing with Savin and the Extemis guy in Iron Man 3…
.. non-superpowered, non-special people tend to be the ones who stand up for what’s right, do their jobs, get right out there in harm’s way, and then usually get killed for it ‘cause nobody paid to see Coulson shoot Loki, win, and save the day without the Avengers having anything to do. And that’s pretty much where Maria Hill stands now, being a perpetual “oh, her" character who functions a lot more like an empty plot device than anybody being bound together by clear, comprehensible motives and purposes.
She’s outlived S.H.I.E.L.D. but that’s left her with no clear purpose and her shift over to Stark Industries makes surprisingly little sense — and, from her dialogue in her second episode of the TV show, is something she has no enthusiasm for herself. She’s never really had any role other than minor skeptic the movies can prove wrong — even when the movies don’t, as in the case of The Avengers — or computer-repeating yes-woman. She doesn’t seem to have any kind of expanded role in this evidently brutally over-stuffed movie. And unlike Rhodes, she doesn’t have a long tenure as a superhero in the comics to serve as a kind of inertiatic shield against being fridged to goose the plot as it shifts from the Pledge to the Turn.
But she is recognizable as somebody who’s been around for a few movies and Done Stuff.
So, given all of the above, I figure she’s dead. She pulls her gun and makes a preliminary stand against Ultron, for which Ultron and the Uldrones kill her in retaliation. (Hey, according to a leaked scene between Cap and Tony Stark, we’re supposed to think shooting first in this sort of scenario is bad now, too, ‘cause “innocent people die”.) Rhodes is knocked out of commission and when he comes to at the end, decides his old pal Tony can’t be trusted any longer and takes his armor and his manpower and throws in with Cap’s team.
Meanwhile, Fury shows up in act two talking about how Hill was his Eye on the Inside — or some such bollocks; why should she ever have an original or independent thought? — and now that she’s dead, he knows it’s serious and thus has resurfaced to throw in his aid.
Of course, in the spirit of completely crazy and unsupportable speculation, Rhodes could die in the party and Maria Hill becomes the New War Machine Who Goes Off with Cap at the End. But that seems sufficiently unlikely -- owing to the business of filmmaking, Marvel’s reluctance to change anything that big, and the politics of fan service -- that it’s not really even worth making the argument for or against it here.
Am I right? Time will tell. It's a circumstantial case, I'll admit, but it unfortunately feels like a pretty good circumstantial case to me.
(On the other hand, a dead Maria Hill is at least free from the ravages of Civil War.)