New EW cover- Avengers: Age of Ultron. Plus Plot Details

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If you’re part of a group that has already saved the world nine times, eventually you can’t help but wonder: Isn’t it somebody else’s turn?

Unfortunately, that kind of thinking directly leads to the latest global threat in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Entertainment Weekly‘s Comic-Con 2014 preview gives you an exclusive First Look at the big, bad robot causing all the grief in next summer’s superhero team-up.

The good guys are tired, S.H.I.E.L.D. has been destroyed, and there’s no one else for the planet to turn to when menace looms on the horizon. Everyone wants a break—and that’s exactly how they’re about to be broken. There’s no abdicating heroism.

“What you said about abdication is apt, but I think it’s also about recognizing limitations,” Robert Downey Jr. says. “The downside of self-sacrifice is that if you make it back, you’ve been out there on the spit and you’ve been turned a couple times and you feel a little burned and traumatized.”

For better or worse (trust us, it’s worse), his Tony Stark has devised a plan that won’t require him to put on the Iron Man suit anymore, and should allow Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and the Hulk to get some much needed R&R as well. His solution is Ultron, self-aware, self-teaching, artificial intelligence designed to help assess threats, and direct Stark’s Iron Legion of drones to battle evildoers instead.

The only problem? Ultron (played by James Spader through performance-capture technology) lacks the human touch, and his superior intellect quickly determines that life on Earth would go a lot smoother if he just got rid of Public Enemy No. 1: Human beings. “Ultron sees the big picture and he goes, ‘Okay, we need radical change, which will be violent and appalling, in order to make everything better’; he’s not just going ‘Muhaha, soon I’ll rule!’” Whedon says, rubbing his hands together.

“He’s on a mission,” the filmmaker adds, and smiles thinly. “He wants to save us.”

The hard part about battling Ultron, as the cover image suggests, is that he’s not just a robot—he’s a program, capable of uploading himself and disappearing not into the clouds but the Cloud. And he has a bad habit of rebuilding himself into stronger and more fearsome physical forms.

The cover story runs through a pivotal early scene in the movie that I witnessed on set, and explains where some of the new characters (Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, The Vision) fall on the good-guy/bad-guy spectrum. It also reveals exactly how Marvel Studios is retooling the origin story for Ultron, who first appeared in the comic books in 1968.

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Following this morning's new images from Joss Whedon's much-anticipated Avengers: Age of Ultron, EW has revealed quite a few details about the plot of the May 1, 2015 release, particularly related to James Spader's robotic antagonist!

"A lot of times when Ultron starts talking, it’s beautiful," explains Chris Evans. "It's really intelligent stuff. He's out to do the things he wants to do because he's disgusted with X, Y, and Z. You could probably sit down with Ultron and have a really intelligent conversation. He could blow your mind with his views."

An unusual foe, Ultron actually wants to bring about world peace. He simply wants to eliminate those most responsible for disrupting it: the human race.

"I know you're 'good' people," the magazine reveals as part of Ultron's dialogue to the Avengers, "I know you mean well… but you just didn't think it through… There is only one path to peace… your extermination."

The magazine confirms that Ultron's character begins as one of Tony Stark's "Iron Legion," a team of Iron Man-type robots that Stark is using to continue his crime-fighting in his absence. The character also serves as a metaphorical surrogate son to Tony and has elements of his personality.

"It's not the good version that could've come from [Stark's] intellect and personality," says Chris Hemsworth. "It's the bad son."

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Following the reveal yesterday detailing the plans of the titular Ultron, Entertainment Weekly is back with more details from the set of Avengers: Age of Ultron, this time on the brother-sister duo of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.

"They're on Team Ultron, which makes things really hard for the Avengers because all of sudden they’re dealing with powers that they’re not used to," director Joss Whedon told the outlet. "With the [first] Avengers, everybody pretty much had the power of being able to punch somebody, and now we have a woman who can get inside your head and move objects, and a boy that can move faster than anything, and a robot [Ultron] who can self-replicate and is out of his mind. So all of sudden, it's a darker, weirder, tougher world that they’re living in."

"There's a lot of clashing. He's quick tempered. He gets agitated. He's impatient. But he's super protective," Aaron Taylor-Johnson said of his character. "They're very yin-and-yang in that twin sense. In his power, he's physical and she's psychological. My character is very much on the frontline, but he can be quite emotional. You see this beautiful tenderness between them."

Another addition to the film will see The Vision, played in person by Paul Bettany who previously only voiced J.A.R.V.I.S. in the Marvel films.

"It's not coincidence," Whedon said. "And I'm not going to tell you any more about The Vision."

The site goes on to report that they were shown test footage of Bettany in character which they said looked "a little more on the purple side of the spectrum than orange" and had "a slightly more technological edge than the original."

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