Weighing in at 141-minutes in length, Joss Whedon’s monstrous Avengers: Age of Ultron was always going to be a mammoth film in every sense of the word. Bridging the gap between Marvel’s Phase Two and Three, this was a superhero sequel that had to introduce new players, set up further connections to the MCU and wrangle together a coherent story in the process. No mean feat, of course, but with such a sprawling canvas, is it likely we’ll get a director’s cut of Whedon’s vision?
In short, no. Throughout the course of his career, Joss Whedon hasn’t been a fan of releasing director’s cuts, instead remaining loyal to the artistic vision that he and the studio had agreed on. Speaking to Collider, here’s the exact reason Age of Ultron will ship without an extended version.
“It has always been my ambition never to do a director’s cut of anything, and always to make the movie with the studio that we both want to make. Ultron was very complex. There was a lot of back-and-forth. My instinct is no. Just as an artist, I’m super f***ing lazy and that sounds like it would be hard. I don’t think there’s interest in it, right now. You’ll see a bunch of stuff on the DVD in extras that were meant to be there. But the narrative came together very close to the way that I hoped it would, and I don’t think it needs me to constantly tweak it.
“The first time I ever heard a re-mix, I was 13 and I was listening to the radio. I heard a song that had been re-mixed and it freaked me out so much that I turned off the radio and never listened to it since, literally. That is an actual truth. I felt like, “Wait, that was the song. You can’t do that.” Our entire culture consists of doing exactly that, but I’m not for it. If I tell a story, I want that to be the story I told.”
Prior to the film’s release, reports suggested that Marvel and Whedon had slight disagreements over the core script, with the studio playing hardball over sequences deemed to be necessary – those same scenes that proved to be somewhat janky in the final cut, such as Thor’s cave scene. Alas, this was all in effort to strengthen the ties with the overarching MCU, and it’s interesting to hear Whedon’s take on the matter at hand.
Whether you loved or loathed it, Avengers: Age of Ultron will no go down as the filmmaker’s final stint at the helm of a Marvel film, passing the torch onto Joe and Anthony Russo for the all-encompassing Avengers: Infinity War Part I and Part II. And we can only imagine the back-and-forth between director and studio over the two-part conclusion.
Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron is expected to roar onto DVD and Blu-Ray later this year.