The cast of The Avengers covers this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly in a wholly bizarre manner. Robert Downey Jr. (as always) fares well in his Tony Stark persona; Scarlett Johansson wields two guns as Black Widow but appears to be missing her shoulders; Chris Hemsworth looks more like Fabio on the cover of a Harlequin romance novel than Thor; Chris Evans (who, sadly, isn’t flashing his waxed nipples) seems ready to burst into tears; and I’m not exactly sure whether Mark Ruffalo knows that his Bruce Banner character is supposed to be, you know, an angry man. What really trips me out though is the amount of Photoshopping that’s been applied to Jeremy Renner’s face — he looks more like a Hawkeye action figure than the real life counterpart. Such a waste. EW has also released a few tidbits from its cover story:

The whole enterprise is falling apart. Egos, tempers, uneasy alliances and bad attitudes are threatening the group, and failure would be catastrophic. Luckily, we’re talking about the actual team of superheroes in the Marvel Studios movie The Avengers, not the cast and crew. In this week’s issue, EW takes a deep dive into the May 4, 2012 movie that will finally unite Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, and Chris Evans’ Captain America – along with Mark Ruffalo’s The Incredible Hulk, Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye and Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow — on the big screen. We use the word “unite” loosely. “Just because they’re super heroes doesn’t mean they’re super friends,” says Renner.

It was a different story with the cast and crew: If anything, they got along too well. Far from home on the Albuquerque set, they had little to do except hang out together, maybe hit a Motley Cruë concert, or go dancing with writer-director Joss Whedon, who says he knew “every dance club in Albuquerque.” Whedon was actually counting on a little bit of friction, since there’s so much in the actual story. “I was like, well, if they hate each other, I guess we can use that,” he shrugs. “But they don’t.”

When he wasn’t out dancing, Whedon was obsessively rewriting dialogue. On the Iron Man movies, Downey was notorious for pushing for heat-of-the-moment script punch-ups (or as he puts it: “I dominated like a rabid, horny gorilla”). And even as part of an ensemble in Avengers, he still nudged Whedon to go a little farther in some scenes. The day EW was on set, Whedon (the creator of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and the acclaimed Astonishing X-Men comic book series) was scribbling out new pages of dialogue right before our eyes. Says the director, “There is a weird element of: they handed me one of the biggest movies of all time, and I’m making it up as I go.”

[From Popwatch]

The box office for this movie is going to be phenomenal, and the careers of everyone (except maybe Renner and RDJ, who are already doing quite well in their other acting endeavors) involved will receive a much-needed boost. Mostly though, the actor who will benefit most from The Avengers is Scarlett. Until she signed on (for a relatively measly $400,000 paycheck) as Black Widow in Iron Man 2, her career had turned into a series of failed period dramas, romcoms, and whatever Woody Allen happened to be filming at the time. Now, she’s part of a superhero franchise. Who would have ever thought it was possible?

Now let’s return to gazing upon (Kaiser already brought you an initial batch) some set photos from The Avengers scenes that shot in New York City early this month.

Photos courtesy of WENN