“I was so beaten down by the process.” “I [came] off of it feeling like a miserable failure.” “I think that did a disservice to the movie and the studio and to myself.” “The things about it that are wrong frustrate me enormously.” These are things Joss Whedon just said about Age of Ultron at the Tribeca Film Festival yesterday.
Photo: AP Images/Shizuo Kambayashi.
Whedon was speaking with actor Mark Ruffalo on stage about the film, which apparently still keeps him up at night. From Variety:
“I was so beaten down by the process,” Whedon said. “Some of that was conflicting with Marvel, which is inevitable. A lot of it was about my own work, and I was also exhausted.”
Whedon blames himself for the narrative that the project wasn’t perfect, and said he had failed.
Age of Ultron definitely had its bad moments — Thor splashing around in that pool is objectively worse than the equally nonsensical but far more exciting Knightmare sequence in Batman v Superman — but it also had a lot of good scenes, too, and Whedon’s flair for dialogue and the cast’s natural charisma together helped keep it from going too far off the rails.
But if you’re one of the many people who had issues with the second Avengers film, rest assured Joss Whedon clearly agrees with you, and his “failure” obviously still haunts him.
Ruffalo told the audience that after Ultron, he pleaded Whedon to do Avengers 3 and 4, Hulk 3 and Thor 3.
“I’ve been begging him, and he said ‘I’ll never do it again’,” Ruffalo said.