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Wednesday, April 22, 2015

"...the number one reason why this stuff works so well is because he takes superhuman people, and he just lets them be super human.”

Joss Whedon's Astonishing, Spine-Tingling, Soul-Crushing Marvel Adventure - BuzzFeed News: "A little over a month before The Avengers opened in May 2012, Whedon was asked by the British magazine SFX how he might try to top the spectacle of the first film if he were to direct the sequel. “By not trying to,” he said. “By being smaller. More personal. More painful.” Three years later, Whedon had spent five months shooting Avengers: Age of Ultron in South Africa, South Korea, Bangladesh, Italy, and London...


What was that again about making the Avengers sequel smaller? “That has not gone my way,” Whedon said with a laugh en route home from the set in July. “I totes failed to make it smaller. There is a lot of movie.” Both Whedon and Feige insist, however, that the precipitously expanding scope of Age of Ultron was never by design. “The truth is, whether anybody will ever believe it or not, we never sat down — we being Joss and I and the team at Marvel — and said, ‘How do we make it even bigger?!’” Feige said on set. “It always was, ‘Where do we want to take the characters?’ That’s the way Joss thinks.”

Whedon’s obvious love for the spirit of each of these genres is matched by his eagerness to crack them open and remake them anew. And with Age of Ultron, he was getting to bring his character-driven, genre-mashing sensibility to life with a blockbuster budget. “I’m doing, ‘ARRRGGGG!’” said Ruffalo, bellowing like the Hulk. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, maybe you should be in that moment like, Oh, what the fuck.’ He’s always bringing it down into these moments that are not superhero, and not grand, and not macho. Just the normal moments that we all experience every single day. I think that’s probably the number one reason why this stuff works so well, because he takes superhuman people, and he just lets them be super human.” 

And there may not be superhumans dearer to Whedon’s heart than the ones who live in the Marvel universe, characters he fell in love with as a young teenager. While talking about the malleability of comic book storylines in his trailer, Whedon said with absolute seriousness, “Nothing has ever made me angrier than the Gwen Stacy slept with Norman Osborn and had genetically enhanced twins [storyline]. Gwen Stacy is the bedrock of the Marvel universe. And that to me is unforgivable.” (This storyline happened, by the way, in the mid-2000s, when Whedon was in his forties.)"

3 comments:

  1. Marvel-Disney has done a fantastic job on almost all their movies. Winter Soldier, Guardians and Dark World were all hugely entertaining (as was Fox's X-Men Days of Future Past). Let's hope Avengers II continues the trend. It will be interesting to see if there's a Spider-man cameo in this movie. Marvel, hopefully, will do a much better job handling its #1 character than Sony did.

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    1. There's a clip floating around of a supposed post-credits scene w/Spider-man, but I've read it's a fake. http://screenrant.com/avengers-age-of-ultron-post-credits-scene-spider-man/ & Yeah, I've loved almost all the Marvel flicks. Winter Soldier, Guardians and the first Avengers were awesome. As was DOFP. Looking forward to Ant Man, Deadpool, Apocalypse & Civil War too. I think Age of Ultron is going to be spectacular.

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  2. Agree 100%. Can't wait to see if Whedon-Marvel can somehow top the Quicksilver bullet scene from DOFP. Ant-Man looks fantastic. I would never have picked him for a movie, but I wouldn't have green-lighted the Guardians either and that was a great flick. Cheers! .

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