Joss Whedon was at South By Southwest over the weekend touting Cabin in the Woods, the oft-delayed horror film that he co-wrote and produced, but he couldn’t help but field answers about the film that fans are most interested in The Avengers. The big news is that Whedon has finally put to rest the notion that the villains aiding Loki in the movie will be the shape-shifting Skulls: “I will say only this: It’s not the Kree or the Skrulls. Those two aliens are Marvel mainstays and have enormous backstories. They have a big life of their own that just could not be contained in a film where I already had seven movie stars. The Skrulls—they can shape change. That’s a whole thing. I’ve already got Loki. He’s got magic. Once you’ve got magic along with your Iron Man and your Black Widow, it’s a real juggling act.”
Asked how he could top the spectacle and the enormous canvas of the first Avengers film in a sequel, Whedon replied: “By not trying to get bigger. By being smaller, more personal, more painful. By being the next thing that should happen to these characters, and not just a rehash of what seemed to work the first time. By having a theme that is completely fresh and organic to itself.”
Whedon told Collider that he had cut the running time for the movie from just over three hours down to two hours and fifteen minutes, which was just as he had envisioned it: “I had always intended to go over two, but under two and a half. There was no way a movie with this many great actors and this much epic scope was going to clock in under two hours and not feel a little anemic, somebody wasn’t going to get their moment if that happened. But at the same time, I get very angry that romantic comedies run over two hours long, it’s like, ‘Guys that’s not okay.’ More isn’t more. I don’t want anything in the movie that shouldn’t be there.”
What about a “director’s cut” for the DVD release? Whedon, who appears not to have suffered at all from studio interference in the editing process, isn’t interested in that since he feels that the 135-minute version he has created is the “director’s cut.” As for the 45 minutes he cut out, well there is some cool stuff, but it will be available as extras and outtakes on the DVD and BD releases, and not reintegrated into a longer “director’s cut” version of the film.
