As you may have heard, Marvel has announced that Joss Whedon will in fact be writing and directing the sequel to this year’s box office juggernaut The Avengers. But that’s not all: Whedon has also signed a 3-year deal with Marvel to produce movies and television exclusively for the studio until June 2015, which means he’ll also have a hand in developing a live-action Marvel show for ABC (parent company Disney owns both Marvel and the network ABC) and the other movies planned for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the next few years.
To which I say: Hell yeah!
We’re still short on details about what the TV series could be like (lots of talk out there about how awesome a SHIELD series would be), but Whedon told Digital Spy a few months back that if he were to work on The Avengers 2, he wouldn’t try to go bigger than the first film. He’d top The Avengers by:
“By not trying to. 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."
Sounds amazing, right? And if you’re a fan of Buffy, Angel, Firefly, and/or Dollhouse, you know he’s good for all of this. Which leads us to...
The relationships. That’s what we’re here for, right? (Says the serial shipper. Heh.) You already know how I feel about a love match for Hawkeye and Black Widow, aka Clint and Natasha, and some are speculating there will be romance between the two as early as Captain America 2 (if they are even in Cap 2, which is completely unconfirmed at this point). Could that and/or other pairings (like Tony/Pepper and Thor/Jane) get screen time in a smaller, more intimate Avengers 2? Or will Whedon stick to developing team dynamics? Perhaps more pressingly...will he kill anyone off and leave us weeping into our popcorn as he did in Serenity?
Heather Waters is a production associate at H&H and a 24/7 fangirl. Tweet her @redline_
