Nice analysis by Zach Baron over at Grantland on how The Avengers easily eclipsed the quality of almost everything released in the summer of 2011:
On the likely chance you’ve blocked the months of May, June, July, and August of last year out of your mind forever, let’s try to make this as brief and non-traumatic as possible. There was the colossally ill-advised attempt to make a star out of Ryan Reynolds and a successful movie franchise out of Green Lantern, a beloved comic book with a wholly impenetrable native mythology (something about “the emerald energy of willpower” and the color yellow, I think). In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Michael Bay forced real-life American hero Buzz Aldrin to salute one CGI robot and nearly raped Rosie Huntington-Whiteley with the creepy animated tendrils of another. And on it went — the sound-stage costume buffoonery of Avengers precursor Thor; X-Men: First Class, a good, kitschy insta-reboot that disappeared into the swamp of a hundred other comic book movies…
Don’t quite agree with his negative take on Thor and especially X-Men: First Class (both are underrated), but Zach makes many excellent points here, both on The Avengers and summer movies in general.