6 Things Joss Whedon Hated About The Avengers
3. Marvel Was As Impatient As Quicksilver
If you thought Avengers 2 was a little frantic, what with over a dozen main characters vying for attention, you should see what it would've looked like if Whedon had let the studio have its way. And if you thought the scenes in the farm, the cave, and the Avengers' own heads were a little confusing, you might've liked them better if they'd run at Whedon's intended length - or if, as some Marvel executives preferred, they were almost skipped altogether.
In other words, Whedon and Marvel clashed repeatedly about his trademark character development and how much of it would end up on the cutting room floor. Thor's sequence in the cave was cut the most, and partly as a result, Thor has very little screen time in the second movie altogether - less than any other Avenger except the Vision, who doesn't even exist for about two-thirds of it. Ironically, the original Thor cave scene was more visual, with the Norns possessing Thor and Selvig asking them questions. But it didn't play well to test audiences, and something had to go.
The dreams were not an executive favorite eitherthe dreams, the farmhouse, these were not things they liked, they were things I fought to keep. With the cave, it really turned into: they pointed a gun at the farms head and said, "Give us the cave, or well take out the farm,"in a civilized way. I respect these guys, theyre artists, but thats when it got really, really unpleasant... I was so beaten down at that point that I was like, "Sure, okay. What movie is this?" And the editors were like, "No. You have to show the . You can't just say it."
Whedon did go on to say that the film is, to his mind, only a couple of minutes too short. You know, just 120,000 milliseconds to a perfectionist.