Was Joss Whedon Overruled On Age of Ultron Scenes?
So ever since the release of Age of Ultron, and in a way a little before that, Joss Whedon has opened up about what it was like on set making this movie. He’s already admitted that it exhausted him, which is why he’s stepping back from making a third Avengers film, but it seems there was more to it than that.
In the movie, there was a subplot with Thor that seemed to be kind of pointless in a way. According to Whedon though during a podcast with Empire Online, there was much more to it than that:
“There was a 195-minute cut of this movie. [In regards to the Thor/Erik subplot], the original scene was that Thor went to speak to the Norn and how it would work was that he’d go in the pool and the Norn possess him, basically, and Erik Selvig [Stellan Skarsgård] asks all the questions, and the Norn, speaking through Thor, give the answers.”
That sounds really interesting, so why didn’t it get in there? Well, apparently it was because of test audiences not feeling the magic. Whedon Added:
“Chris [Hemsworth] got to do something different, and he really threw himself into it, and he did a beautiful job, but it wasn’t well regarded by the test audiences, and I feel it’s probably largely because it was a rough cut with no effects, but also because it’s something that in a Thor movie would work brilliantly, but in this movie is just a little too left of center.”
That’s a pity, because I think that would’ve been really cool, but the real doozy is what Whedon revealed about the Marvel executives. Apparently, they didn’t like the dream scenes or the farmhouse scene with the Hawkeye family (the latter of which was one of my favorite parts of the movie in my opinion). Whedon apparently fought hard for them to be in the movie. He continued:
“The dreams were not an executive favourite. The dreams, the farmhouse, these were things I fought [for]. With the cave, they pointed a gun at the farm’s head and [said], ‘Give us the cave’. They got the farm. In a civilised way – I respect these guys, but that’s when it got really unpleasant. There was a point when there was going to be no cave, and Thor was going to leave and come back and say, ‘I figured some stuff out.’ And at that point I was so beaten down, I was like, ‘Sure, okay…what movie is this?’ The editors were like, ‘No no, you have to show the thing, you just can’t say it.’ I was like, ‘Okay, thank you, we can figure this out!’ You can tell it was beaten down, but it was hard won.”
Yowza. That doesn’t sound very nice does it? Thankfully, they were kept in the movie, but it may have at a high price, meaning Joss Whedon. Hopefully. this doesn’t cause an unfriendly rift between the two.