MCU: 10 Fascinating Facts Behind Avengers: Age Of Ultron (2015)

4. It's A Frankenstein Story (And Tony Is The Villain)

If you picked up heavy Frankenstein vibes from the film, it wasn't accidental. Whedon revealed as much in his commentary, revealing that he'd drawn from J. Searle Dawley's 1910 silent adaptation of the story:

“I like robot stories because they’re Frankenstein stories. As you can see, I leaned pretty heavily into that. [The first Ultron] I always think of as resembling the very first movie of Frankenstein, which I’ve only ever seen a still from. It’s this weird, screaming almost mummy-like kind of guy with strings of tattered cloth coming off his arms. As much puppet and as much scary robot, we wanted to evoke that first Frankenstein film.”

He also reveals why he turned to the story at all:

“It all has to do with the central human question: ‘Why am I here? What is this place?’ Because we all have to ask that. We all have to feel the pain of being brought into a world that was not made to accommodate us. The Frankenstein story and most robot stories — where the robots are anything other than just a killing machine — explore that… The way it gets simplified in a robot story is really fascinating. We can really ask what it means to be human when we take away all the things that it means to be human except for one.”

And just as Dr Frankenstein's over-reaching is the issue in the story, Tony Stark is the real villain of Age Of Ultron. Or at least that was Whedon's intention:

“One of the things that also sort of hit me late in the game is that you can look at this film and straight up say, ‘Tony Stark is the villain.’ It’s not just the beard. He’s a good man who is corrupted by his own anxiety. He has this vision of a disaster and makes what is obviously a really bad decision. I spent so much time during the writing process and during filming trying to protect Tony Stark and to make sure he was still a heroic figure. At one point, I watched the movie and went, ‘You can just go ahead and lean into this. He has now evolved into a villain.”