Overview
Item 47 is a 2012 American direct-to-video short film featuring the Marvel Comics organization S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division), produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment on the home media release of Marvel's The Avengers. It is a follow-up and spin-off of The Avengers, and is the third Marvel One-Shot short film set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), sharing continuity with the films of the franchise. The film is directed by Louis D'Esposito, with a screenplay by Eric Pearson, and stars Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Bradford, Maximiliano Hernández, and Titus Welliver, with Hernández reprising his role from the film series. In Item 47, two civilians come across a Chitauri gun and use it to commit crimes.
The short helped lead to ABC ordering a television series spin-off, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which began airing in September 2013.
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 Jasper Sitwell and Felix 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
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).