What Joss Whedon Wanted to Do Differently on 'Avengers: Age of Ultron'
Like most movie fans, Joss Whedon was happy with how the first Avengers film turned out. But that doesn’t mean the 50-year-old writer-director wanted to replicate the 2012 hit with this weekend’s Avengers: Age of Ultron.
“There was no reason for me to make the same movie twice,” Whedon told Yahoo Movies during a recent interview, which you can watch above. “I wanted to make something different. I wanted to explore the characters in a different way, [and] I wanted to go a little deeper.”
You could understand if Whedon would’ve leaned on his laurels just a little bit with Part II: Its predecessor was a massive hit, smashing box-office records and eventually earning more than $620 million in the U.S. and $1.5 billion worldwide, making it the third-highest grossing film of all time.
Now that the actual assembling of its six main heroes (Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye) is out of the way, Age of Ultron does indeed dig a little bit deeper into the stories and minds of its superheroes, adding romance between two of them, turmoil among many of them (which nicely sets up one of Marvel’s next adventures, Captain America: Civil War), and even an unexpected home-life backstory we won’t spoil here. It also adds to the mix the super-powered twins Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, not to mention its titular villain.
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Another area Whedon sought to improve was the overall feel of the film, which has a grittier aesthetic than the first. “I really changed up the way I shot this movie. I wanted it to have a different look,” he explained. “I wanted it to be something visually arresting in a way that the first one wasn’t necessarily.”
As Whedon puts it in terms food lovers can understand, he didn’t want to serve turkey for lunch two days in a row. The filmmaker has already announced that Ultron will be his last Avengers movie, which is unfortunate: We’d love to see what he could cook up for another meal.
Avengers: Age of Ultron opens Friday. See what the cast says about their various costume upgrades:
