Why joss whedon is a genius avengers

Produced by Marvel, distributed by Marvel's owner, Disney, and with a story line all but predetermined by Marvel, it is perhaps the absolute Bizarro-world opposite of independence.

The Avengers unites the narratives of five interconnected movies from the past few years and is the ignition point for a decade of potential sequels and new superhero pictures. With the turbines of the Disney-Marvel machine spinning up, why would the company let this commercially unproven director—no matter how smart he is—helm the ship?

Then again, tent-pole blockbusters are a pain in the ass to oversee. Whedon has a fan base that rivals Star Trek's in its ferocity, and he's doing just fine producing smaller movies.

So maybe the bigger question is, why would this cult-favorite writer-director ever put up with The Avengers? Buffy the Vampire Slayer began as a failure. Whedon, then a young writer toiling in the sitcom fields, wrote it as a movie script that pivoted on a central twist: A vicious monster follows a beautiful teenage girl into a dark alley, and only the girl walks back out. Whedon wanted to make the ingenue into an action hero, to literally empower a young woman.

But the film, directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, turned into a slapstick farce. It's not without charm, but big-screen Buffy seems petulant, and the jeopardy feels false.

Too much flounce, not enough kickboxing. Whedon went on to success as a screenwriter and script doctor, working on Toy Story and Alien: Resurrection and doing uncredited work like a rewrite of Speed. But a few years later TV producers got interested in redoing Buffy as a half-hour kids' show, the kind of thing that could run after Power Rangers.

Whedon got on board. He even remembers the first gag he came up with for the show: A group of vampires would be waiting to attack Buffy , and one of them would say, "Why don't we all attack her at once? It's an honor thing. Seeing Whedon's enthusiasm and the richness of his ideas, the newly formed WB network bought the concept as an hour-long drama and put Whedon in charge. The series, which ran from to , creates a metaphorical universe that renders the awfulness of adolescence through the conventions of horror and sci-fi.

High school is hell—literally. Be ignored by your peers and turn invisible. Sneak out to a frat party and get molested by a giant white snake demon in the basement. Lose your virginity and your boyfriend becomes an evil monster. Sometimes you can communicate only through music; sometimes because of magic you can't communicate at all.

They wanted to have sex, and then they did, and it was weird. They couldn't pass chemistry. Popular kids made fun of them. But somehow, when all that common drama happened against the backdrop of apocalyptic villainy and portals to other dimensions, it became—to a certain subset of pop-culture consumers—not less believable but more relatable.

Whedon had found his narrative sweet spot: making stories about what his fans felt but couldn't articulate. How does he do it? The vampire and werewolf stuff may have been cheesy, but the stories never were. Whedon told his writers to avoid "moves"—stuff that happens only for the sake of advancing the plot or for a cool action sequence.

And, of course, he put in all the Whedonisms. No wonder the show found a ready audience of cultural-studies academics, who jumped to unpack its many layers. Buffy 's cult status defined the WB as a network of hot young people doing improbable things, a tradition that lives on in its offspring, the CW. But the show's magic proved difficult to replicate in Whedon's follow-up projects. Angel , a spinoff about Buffy's ex-boyfriend, ran for five years and had a few wonderfully weird episodes, but it never matched Buffy 's cultural impact.

Firefly attracted a similarly small albeit way more vocal fan base on the Fox network. As a student of film professor Jeanine Basinger, whose many successful ex-students include A Beautiful Mind writer Akiva Goldsman and Transformers inflictor Michael Bay, Whedon had learned to read films closely, to watch movie after movie until 3 am, finding not 10 things to say about the title number in Singin' in the Rain but 1, But now his command of subtext was starting to feel more like—well, like text.

That Whedonesque self-awareness was verging on parody. The cadre of folks he worked with regularly—actors, writers, producers—stayed loyal. But Whedon's audience remained stubbornly small. He fought with Fox network executives, then talked about the fights to the press. Note to aspiring television writers: This is maybe not the best way to persuade a network to back your new show. He tried to develop other Buffy spinoffs, but none took. His pitch for a Batman reboot was rebuffed in favor of what became Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins.

His script for a Wonder Woman movie got trapped in development hell. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog , made during a writers' strike, proved that people would buy single-shot entertainment online, but it was a sad musical comedy about a supervillain. Financial problems at MGM were delaying the release of The Cabin in the Woods , which he'd written and produced back in On the web and at pop-culture nexus Comic-Con, where Whedon appeared on panels and walked the floor every year, he was a god.

But in Hollywood? Not so much. As they say in comic books: Meanwhile! Something strange was going on with movies about superheroes. They were getting good. And they were using tools from the same hardware store where Whedon shopped. Bryan Singer's X-Men pictures applied the conventions of the genre to shed light on how it feels to be an outcast.

The first two Spider-Man movies played up the hapless geekiness of alter ego Peter Parker and the daydream fulfillment of being a wisecracking superathlete. Not incidentally, these were all characters from comics published by Marvel. Marvel, on the other hand, was doing so well with its A-list characters that in the company took the bold step of financing its own theatrical releases.

It would translate its characters its own way. Spider-Man had been indentured to Sony, and the X-Men and Fantastic Four were already at Fox, but the remaining roster of potential movie heroes was still plenty deep. First up: Iron Man, an alcoholic gazillionaire playboy who builds his own rocket-powered exoskeleton. Then there's the Hulk, a brilliant scientist who turns into a massively strong, uncontrollable green monster. Oh, and Captain America—a supersoldier from World War II brought into the present—and Thor, a hammer-wielding Norse god with superpowers and family drama that makes the real housewives of Atlanta look like the Osmonds.

Unlike the gleaming, godlike DC heroes, Marvel characters are more likely to regard their powers as a curse than a blessing; great power has a pesky tendency to come with great responsibility.

And that makes for pretty good movie plots. All those characters had something else in common: They were the core of a comic book team that began in called the Avengers, Marvel's answer to DC's Justice League of America. Comics fans love team-ups—more heroes per page for the same cover price is a good value. And the Marvel Comics universe has always been tightly integrated; the cataclysmic devastation of Manhattan in The Spectacular Spider-Man could cross over into that month's Fantastic Four.

But the idea that Spider-Man movies could happen in the same universe as X-Men movies? Save that kind of talk for the comics shop, kid.

With Iron Man , though, Marvel itself was running the show—and suddenly the answer was, "Hell yes. Jackson's agents had called Feige to ask about a part in Iron Man —Jackson was, after all, the model for the revamped comics character Nick Fury, head of the security agency S. So Feige asked director Jon Favreau to add a scene with Jackson as Fury, welcoming Iron Man's alter ego to a larger world of superheroes. It's not that Joss Whedon is repetitive. He just has a happy place, a set of themes and narrative motifs that have come to define his work.

Here's a look at what to expect from any Whedon project—including The Avengers. Oh, and spoiler alert! River Tam in Serenity. Echo from Dollhouse. Whedon loves to populate his work with ass-kicking ingenues, and Black Widow in The Avengers is no exception. Who were the kindest, funniest, most emotionally available characters in Serenity? Spaceship pilot Wash and preacher Shepherd Book.

Who was dead by the end? You got it. Even some of the regulars in Whedon's crew of recurring actors can't quite handle his rapid-fire Whedonisms. For the raw feed, check out his comic book work, especially Astonishing X-Men.

Whedon taught himself to play piano before writing the songs in Buffy 's musical episode. Angel had a recurring music-be-the-food-of-love riff too, and Dr. Horrible is a straight-up musical. None of the Avengers trailers show the Hulk crooning, but you never know. Whedon is a fount of fan service. His ensembles are precooked for fanfic potential—hell, he's even written comic books that take place in his shows' universes after they're canceled.

Not that you'd necessarily root for demon gods and megalomaniacal vampires, but when Whedon writes them you at least get where they're coming from. Not only are Whedon's characters preternaturally aware of their own strengths and weaknesses, they're good at articulating them If Iron Man had flopped, the cameo would have been a throwaway joke.

And Disney's acquisition of Marvel at the end of was an all-in bet. Disney needed a hook into the audience of boys a problem that's only grown more acute with the failure of March's John Carter.

Princesses weren't doing it; superheroes would. Lots of superheroes. Marvel started cranking out a new crop of movies, each featuring a different character, and fans began to realize that they hinted at a wider crossover potential. Stark had Captain America's shield in his house. The bad guy in The Incredible Hulk got injected with a version of the supersoldier serum that created Captain America. It wasn't that hard; Marvel was there to help the writers with a whole basket of Easter eggs: paramilitary agencies, Nazi scientists, magic cubes, secret formulas, and so on.

The moviemakers started watching one another's rough cuts and consulting with a "creative committee" of Marvel Comics writers. In its movies, Marvel had hit upon a secret formula of its own. Audiences learned to stay through the end of the closing credits, because a guest star would show up and say something portentous. Something wicked awesome this way comes. But despite Feige's enthusiasm for The Avengers , the movie had problems. By February Feige had a script but no director.

The Avengers would have to give rise to it own sequels and spinoff properties. Worse, the movie was feeling awfully crowded. And while it wasn't a requirement, it'd be nice to have someone with geek cred—someone who knew their way around comic books.

Then Whedon's agent called to ask whether Feige would meet the director about working on The Avengers. Feige was already a fan.

He had read one of Whedon's original good scripts for Alien: Resurrection , and in he had brought in Whedon to pitch himself as director for Iron Man. Plus, Whedon had done an uncredited rewrite on Captain America. All his shows had been ensemble pieces, and his best-known work had been in genre, giving him a thick coating of credibility. Whedon had even spent nearly four years writing a brilliant and much-loved X-Men comic book series. His go-to move, the superpowered ingenue, was inspired by the X-Men character Kitty Pryde, a plucky young girl who can walk through walls.

On the other hand, Whedon had directed only one movie— Serenity , a sequel to Firefly —which flopped. And his work was all just so This is set to be one of the big films of the year, both with critics and audiences. What's it all about? Well, there's this mysterious energy source called The Tesseract that Thor's brother Loki is after. But really, it's about good versus evil and coming together to choose a side. You don't need to be a geek raised on Marvel comic books to love this movie although if you are, that's a bonus.

Remember that great moment in Green Lantern? Nope, there wasn't anyway. Big films need big moments that stick with you, whether it's the upside down kiss with Spider-Man or Heath Ledger's Penguin and his ability to use a pencil.

This is a film with big moments that will leave you wanting to see it again. We've been waiting for years for this to come true.