Item 47

Plot

Bennie and Claire, a down-on-their-luck couple, find a discarded Chitauri gun ("Item 47") left over from the attack on New York City in The Avengers. The couple use it to rob a few banks, drawing the attention of S.H.I.E.L.D., which assigns agents Sitwell and Blake to retrieve the weapon and "neutralize" the couple. Agent Sitwell tracks the couple down to a motel room that gets wrecked in the subsequent confrontation, and the stolen money gets destroyed. Instead of killing the couple, Sitwell invites them to join S.H.I.E.L.D., with Bennie assigned to the R&D 'think-tank' to reverse engineer the Chitauri technology, and Claire becoming Blake's assistant.

Cast

Production

Item 47 was directed by Marvel Studios co-president Louis D’Esposito, written by Eric Pearson, and music by Christopher Lennertz. The short film, which was filmed over four days, has a runtime of 12 minutes, longer than the previous films, which were no longer than 4 minutes. Pearson and D'Esposito had the idea for the short after watching The Avengers and thinking, "New York is a mess. There must be weapons everywhere".

Release

Item 47 was released on The Avengers Blu-ray on September 25, 2012. It will be included on the bonus-disc of the "Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase Two Collection" box set, which includes all of the Phase Two films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well as the other Marvel One-Shots. The collection features audio commentary from D'Esposito, Hernandez, Welliver and Bradford, and was released on December 8, 2015.

Reception

Andre Dellamorte of Collider called Item 47 "silly". William Bibbiani of Crave Online said, "The short is largely a success: Hernandez, Bradford and Caplan are all in fine form although, Welliver seems saddled with a little awkward dialogue, particularly in regards to Coulson, which doesn’t entirely sell." Spencer Terry of Superhero Hype! said, "[Item 47] is easily the best one they've done, and I think that can be attributed to its length seeing as it's three times longer than the other One-Shots. With a longer run time, the short film doesn't have to rush to show us everything that it wants to - we get a clear understanding of both the S.H.I.E.L.D. perspective of the events and the robbers' point of view."

Television series

Disney CEO Bob Iger greenlit a television series based on S.H.I.E.L.D. at ABC after watching Item 47. Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was officially picked up in May 2013. Welliver, having been introduced in the One-Shot, reprises his role in the series as a guest star.