When Joss Whedon made the 2015 Marvel movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, he was at the top of his career. He was coming off of the successes of the beloved TV shows he’d created, Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He had made the box office hit films Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers, and no one had come out and talked about what a jerk he was yet. Things were good. But he had run into an issue making the Avengers sequel that he hadn’t anticipated, and it foretold a sort of rut the studio has found itself in all these years later.
In an old interview with Buzzfeed News, Whedon talked about the problem he had in making a big budget movie that feels as though it’s just part of an ongoing story, like an episode of a series.
“No matter how much they may talk about, ‘Well, this is going to lead to some terrible stuff down the line,’ in my movie, it’s designed to be a complete experience. And if I don’t do that, if I haven’t brought you on that journey and closed it out, fuck me. That’s the danger of this sort of serialized storytelling, turning the motion picture experience into episodic TV. Because we have episodic TV, and now you don’t even have to wait to watch it, you can binge it. So that’s to me a dreadful mistake.”
He laughed bitterly, and added:
“Somebody said, ‘Well, that was a great setup for the next thing!’ in one of the test screenings, and I died inside. [Marvel executives] were like, ‘No! They say that all the time, it’s fine.’ I was like, ‘No, that’s the worst thing I could have heard.’ I want people to come out feeling done.”
That’s just the nature of what Kevin Feige has built with the MCU. The films mostly have an interconnectedness, and while it makes the entire viewing process a lot of fun, it may hurt a film on its own. I think that while some of the films in the franchise have suffered to do well, they have all played a part in the overall story, and I’ve enjoyed the ride. While it hasn’t been perfect as we change the narrative between filmmakers, they’ve done a pretty good job with continuity, and I’m still invested.
What do you think about what Whedon said?
When Joss Whedon made the 2015 Marvel movie Avengers: Age of Ultron , he was at the top of his career. He was coming off of the successes of the beloved TV shows he’d created, Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer . He had made the box office hit films Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers , a Read More