Joss Whedon Reveals Clash With Marvel Over Pivotal Avengers: Age Of Ultron Scene

With Avengers: Age Of Ultron now out in the US, director Joss Whedon has shared a few rather spoilerific secrets about the film. Chatting to the Empire podcast, Whedon revealed disputes with the studio over certain scenes in the movie. One in particular where Marvel overruled Whedon was the Hawkeye farm scene, with the archer about to leave his wife for another Avengers mission:

"I shot that scene two ways. I had written as, 'Go save the world, honey, and come back home to me!' Then I thought, 'Oh! I hate this.' But the studio quite liked it, and it wasn€™t bad and Linda Cardellini is the secret weapon of this movie. I thought they shouldn€™t say any of those things, they should just know she doesn€™t want him to go."

The tradeoffs, it seems, were the Thor cave and dream scenes. He revealed that the sequences were originally much longer, and also that Thor's dream originally featured an appearance from Loki. The execs, however, felt that adding the God of Mischief into an already overstuffed film would be too much:

"The dreams were not an executive favourite. The dreams, the farmhouse, these were things I fought . With the cave, they pointed a gun at the farm€™s head and 'Give us the cave'. They got the farm."

According to Whedon, he was so beaten down with the process that at one point there was to be no cave scene at all, and things got rather "unpleasant." The end result is a part of the movie that does feel a little underserved. The Buffy creator also revealed that Bruce Banner and Natasha Romanoff's bedroom scene was changed in reshoots on the studio's request, and discussed further plot points including the last line of the movie, Quicksilver's death, and more in what was a rather insightful interview. With two of the biggest movies of all-time under his belt, Whedon now seems to be keen to take a step out of the spotlight. He has spoken previously of needing a break, and he has now also quit Twitter. Reports suggest that abusive messages may have played a part in the decision, with Whedon receiving a lot of 'hate' for Black Widow's arc. Given Whedon's track-record of having strong female characters playing prominent roles in the TV shows and movies, to accuse him of being un-feminist seems rather absurd. Here's hoping we see him back on Twitter, and more importantly back behind a camera, before too long.