More Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Mania at Comic Con

Fans React to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Pilot (Minimal Spoilers)



Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. actor's panel interview:



Marvel Highlights Reel:

Joss Whedon on the Colbert Show June 20, 2013

Joss on Colbert talking about Much Ado and Avengers II

Robert Downey Jr. Signed for Avengers 2

Robert Downey Jr. WILL Definitely appear in Avengers 2, which is good news since Director Joss Whedon recently said the movies couldn't be made with him.

Whedon Via Daily Beast

He is Iron Man. He is Iron Man in the way that Sean Connery was James Bond. I have no intention of making Avengers 2 without him, nor do I think I’ll be called upon to do that. I don’t think it’s in my interest, Marvel’s interest, or his interest, and I think everything will be fine. But I know that this is Hollywood and you roll with things. You have to be ready for the unexpected. But I loved working with Robert, and everybody knows he embodied that role in a way no one else can. The day he was cast, I went up to [Marvel Studios president] Kevin Feige and said, “You brilliant son of a bitch.”

EW Inside Movies

Picture a big pile of money in that metal hand.

Robert Downey Jr. has reached a two-picture deal with Marvel Studios to appear in The Avengers 2 and The Avengers 3 — but notably

He reportedly earned more than $50 million for The Avengers, and although his multi-picture contract with the comic-book moviemakers was fulfilled by Iron Man 3, everyone involved was moving forward as if a deal for more films was inevitable.

“I’d go start another one tomorrow, but it’s not tomorrow,” Downey told EW when Iron Man 3 was debuting. “And there are a lot of other considerations. But I also don’t like the idea of leaving people hanging or leaving people in the lurch.”

Whedon Talks Avengers in The Daily Beast

Joss Whedon on Shakespeare, Female Superheroes and Feminism (and lots of other stuff) via Daily Beast

Excerpt:

Where does your fondness for heroines come from?

I was raised by a hardcore feminist. I was also much smaller than my brothers and bullied a lot, so I identify with the feeling of helplessness.

Why do you think there’s a lack of female superheroes in film?

Toymakers will tell you they won’t sell enough, and movie people will point to the two terrible superheroine movies that were made and say, You see? It can’t be done. It’s stupid, and I’m hoping The Hunger Games will lead to a paradigm shift. It’s frustrating to me that I don’t see anybody developing one of these movies. It actually pisses me off. My daughter watched The Avengers and was like, “My favorite characters were the Black Widow and Maria Hill,” and I thought, Yeah, of course they were. I read a beautiful thing Junot Diaz wrote: “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”

. . . The Avengers 2 is on the horizon, and Robert Downey Jr. is technically not signed yet. How crucial is he to the franchise? His Tony Stark is almost Shakespearean.

He is Iron Man. He is Iron Man in the way that Sean Connery was James Bond. I have no intention of making Avengers 2 without him, nor do I think I’ll be called upon to do that. I don’t think it’s in my interest, Marvel’s interest, or his interest, and I think everything will be fine. But I know that this is Hollywood and you roll with things. You have to be ready for the unexpected. But I loved working with Robert, and everybody knows he embodied that role in a way no one else can. The day he was cast, I went up to [Marvel Studios president] Kevin Feige and said, “You brilliant son of a bitch.”

How did you get to direct The Avengers?

I’d known Kevin for a while and was brought on just to read the script and advise the way I have with plenty of people. Eventually, I thought there was a story that I’d like to tell, and Kevin and I were on the same page about that. I took a big financial hit doing that movie. They know it’s your [big] break. Plus, you don’t do it for the money—even if there is the money—because people will know. They’ll smell it. But I fell in love with the story and they liked my version of it.

Joss Whedon on Jimmy Fallon

From Variety:

After confirming that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver would be in “Avengers 2,” Joss Whedon gave some clarity to why he chose those characters to appear in the next pic on Friday nights Jimmy Fallon Show.

. . . “I found their powers to be very visually interesting,” Whedon explains. “In the last film a lot of the characters had very ‘punchy powers’ where they were always punchy something and that got kind of boring after awhile.”

Whedon added that no one had been cast yet and Fallon followed up by jokingly suggesting Selena Gomez and Channing Tatum.

S.H.I.E.L.D. and Avengers 2 ~ Rumors and Spoilers

Rumors and Spoilers are flying around - hard to know what to believe at this point.

Joss Whedon hinted at new characters in The Avengers 2

Joss Whedon hints Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are in Avengers 2: on.io9.com/gZqepaF
— io9 (@io9) April 25, 2013

From AceShowBiz

The 48-year-old filmmaker revealed that fans would get to see two new characters in the film.

"I've been writing and meeting with actors and we're starting to storyboard, all the preliminary processes. This is the part where it's all still fun," Whedon told Yahoo! Movies. "I've got these two characters, two of my favourite characters from the comic book, a brother-sister act. They're in the movie."

Without further details of the new additions, fans are left to guess who the pair might be, leading to speculation that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver may be the ones Whedon adds to the sequel to "The Avengers".

. . . the siblings, who are Magneto's twin children, first appear in the X-Men mythology as villains. Scarlet Witch, who wears wimple, has the power to cast hexes to manipulate probability. Her brother Quicksilver, meanwhile, is capable of moving and thinking at superhuman speeds.

And there's a rumor of a character's "resurrection" in S.H.I.E.L.D.

From Hit/Fix

...Today, an alleged spoiler went up online about the "Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D." pilot, and specifically the fate of Agent Phil Coulson, played in "Iron Man," "Iron Man 2," "Thor," "The Avengers," and even the "Ultimate Spider-Man" animated show by Clark Gregg. His death was a major turning point for The Avengers as a team, and it helped unite them against Loki and the invading aliens. /Film seems pretty confident that their report is correct, and it certainly makes a logical sort of sense.

Once Coulson was announced as part of the series, I figured there'd be something like this included in the pilot. The report raises questions that I assume will be addressed in the series, but for now, this appears to be the truth about how Marvel plans to resurrect the character:

In the pilot, it’s revealed Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the ultimate super spy, faked Agent Coulson’s death on purpose to motivate The Avengers. Some S.H.I.E.L.D. members were in on it (including, possibly, Maria Hill played by Cobie Smulders) but The Avengers were not. Their security clearance wasn’t high enough. Coulson was forced to hold his breath as part of the ruse and that’s a point of contention among his colleagues  After the fact, Fury moved him to a remote location until things died down, and then he was reinserted into duty at the time of the show.

If this turns out to be the way they handle things, it should create some serious tension between Coulson and the heroes who believed him to be dead. It's also going to create some trust issues for Nick Fury.

Joss Whedon Talks Shakespeare, S.H.I.E.L.D., Star Wars, and Success

Joss Whedon is hot these days, so hot he describes himself as "jammed" by success. He has been at the South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Conference in Austin Texas, where he debuted his new low-budget version of "Much Ado About Nothing." So several interviews have come out of that:


This one on the red carpet:



A tidbit about S.H.I.E.L.D. from a Q and A with the crowd, via Comic Book Movie:

. . . Coulson died at the hands of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in The Avengers. With the show taking place after the climatic battle with the Chituari in NYC many theorized that Coulson would be seen in flashback, that he was really a robot, a Skrull shape-shifter or something else equally outlandish. Well S.H.I.E.L.D. executive producer Joss Whedon told the crowd at SXSW that Coulson is in fact returning from the dead.

“I’ll tell you guys this, Heimlich,” Whedon joked, before effectively clamming up about the show. “I can’t talk about it,” he admitted, but said that he did bring Coulson back from the dead for the ABC drama. “Yes. For realsies.”

Now that it's established that Coulson really did die in The Avengers and that Fury didn't lie to the other Avengers, the question now is HOW does Coulson come back from the dead? There are a number of items and methods that this could be used to accomplish this in the pages of Marvel Comics but the vast majority of such devices have yet to be presented in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

On bringing back the original Star Wars characters, via Digital Spy:

The director has said that he would have been interested in the job of directing Star Wars: Episode VII, had his commitments to The Avengers 2 not taken him out of the running.

Asked by Digital Spy which original series characters he would want to see return in the new films, Whedon said that he would take a different approach.

"You know, I wouldn't go back, I'd go forward. I would want to create characters that would resonate the way that they did," he explained.

Whedon also discussed the rumors that Lucasfilm and Disney may be looking to recast the role of Han Solo with a younger actor for a potential standalone film.

And still another in-depth interview on Deadline.com in which he talks about shooting "Much Ado," his own success with gives him little free time to do various projects, whassup with S.H.I.E.L.D., and finally more regret that he wasn't able to direct Star Wars:

Excerpts:

DEADLINE: You shot Much Ado secretly from the press. Did you keep it from Marvel as well?
WHEDON: No, I absolutely told them because if that got out and they hadn’t known, I think that would have caused some concern. I told them I was going to do this and I snuck out for a few afternoons to rehearse, and I took one extra day after Monday. But it really didn’t interfere with the schedule much at all. And I had boundless energy when I returned. I think it worried them! Kevin [Feige] and Jeremy [Latcham], their faces were kind of pasty and their mouths were dry but they said, ‘It’s good, you’ll have a good time… we support you’. I think they found out and I found out what that this was the only way to relax me.

DEADLINE: You need relaxing?
WHEDON: I’m in constant danger of burning out. Look, this is not a healthy person talking to you. ’I’m going to make a sequel to the biggest movie I’ve ever made!’ … ’Perhaps a TV show would go along nicely with that…’ I always order the entire left side of the menu and then wonder why I’m full. With Much Ado it was different because it was truly contained. The script had been written. There were things that took a lot of time to edit. I didn’t know how to work Final Cut Pro — Danny [Kaminsky] my assistant had to teach me. He’s also a producer on the movie and edited it with me. And of course when I couldn’t afford a composer I said, let’s do even more work! But that I could do on our own time around the Avengers schedule.

~~~ snip ~~~  

DEADLINE: You’ve just wrapped the S.H.I.E.L.D. pilot, another part of the Marvel universe. WHEDON: That was fun to do, but again, too much work. The idea of the Little Guy is something that I am very fierce about, and there has never been a better Little Guy than Clark Gregg. That intrigued me, this world around the superhero community. It’s the people whose shop windows get blown up when the Destroyer shows up. It’s the more intimate stories that belong on television that we can really tap into the visual style and ethos, and even some of the mythology, of the Marvel movies. I think we’ve put together another really great ensemble headed by Clark. And how much it’s actually seeding or hinting or reacting to what’s going on in the movies is something we’ll let play out as we go. For me the most important thing is that people fall in love with it on its own merits, rather than constantly asking, “Is there gonna be an Avenger?” Well, there’s not gonna be a Hulk because that guy’s too expensive.  

DEADLINE: Is the plan for you to run S.H.I.E.L.D.?
WHEDON: I will be as involved as I can be – mostly on a story level. On the TV show I can say, “No, do it my way.” I’m just trying to keep it exciting and meaningful and surprising.  

DEADLINE: At what point did you realize these small passion projects could be marketable? WHEDON: Dr. Horrible changed everything for me. We started it because of the Writer’s Strike. And I watched other people making other original shows. I tried to partner with various people from Silicon Valley and that never goes anywhere. Finally I was like, let’s just do this. And it was a monster hit. The payback for the amount that we did was absurd.

~~~ snip ~~~

DEADLINE: You couldn’t do the Star Wars gig. Would you have had a take?
WHEDON: Oh yeah. And it’s not just Star Wars. Everything I see I think, Oh, I’d really love to do one of those. I’ll read something or have an actual idea of my own, and think, I wish I could do something with that. And sometimes you can say, “I think I will”. But I’m trying to be a little more careful in the next few years about budgeting my time than I was in the last two.

DEADLINE: Did you take a meeting with Lucasfilm? WHEDON: No, all of this happened long after I was committed to The Avengers, so there was never any question. There was just a peep of sadness from me. But I think, in all honesty, that JJ Abrams is the guy for the gig and I couldn’t be happier about that.

Joss Whedon Talks Avengers II

Joss Whedon's modern update of Much Ado About Nothing opened in Ireland today, and he did a press interview which mentioned his attitude towards The Avengers II:

From ComicBookMovie:

Responding to questions about doing more Shakespeare, Whedon says he doesn't want to do another one exactly like he did Much Ado About Nothing. He says that he needs to keep trying different things from a creative standpoint. From there, the discussion turned to The Avengers sequel.

Whedon: When I first considered doing Avengers 2, my first question was what can I do that's new? Because I can't make it bigger....but I can make it better.

The moderator asks about his philosophy for Avengers 2.

Whedon: Death, death and death. (Crowd applauds madly.)