6. Creating Ultron – Avengers: Age of Ultron
It’s possible for something to be incredibly stupid but entirely understandable at the same time, and that’s exactly what we’ve got here. Avengers: Age of Ultron follows the team of MCU heroes as they recover from the events of the first Avengers movie, learning who they are as a team and what their responsibilities are to the world in general. This leads to some infighting among the heroes, especially as Tony Stark believes that they should be taking a more proactive approach to planetary defense.
Despite there being vocal opposition to this idea, Stark’s previous experiences in The Avengers and its immediate aftermath get the better of him, and he ignores his fellow heroes. This sees Stark build Ultron, a super-intelligent AI tasked with protecting the planet. Except, Ultron predictably sees humans as the biggest threat to the world, then seizes control of Stark’s technology and decides to wipe out humanity.
The general idea behind Ultron is sound: protecting the world from superpowered threats is ultimately a good thing. However, the way that Tony Stark approaches it half-cocked and against the advice of his fellow heroes is definitely less intelligent, which is proved by how epically his plan backfires. It’s only by a very narrow margin that the Avengers manage to stop Ultron, and they aren’t able to stop the destruction of an entire city and thousands of collateral deaths. However you look at it, Tony Stark really dropped the ball on that one.