Joss Whedon talks The Hulk & coming up with ideas for Avengers 2

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

With Mark Ruffalo's The Hulk not getting a solo movie (for now, anyway), many Marvel fans are very excited to see him back on the big screen in AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON. We already know The Hulk will have a bigger role in the upcoming film, and while speaking with IGN, Joss Whedon talked about the expansion of the character, and if he'll talk more in THE AVENGERS sequel.

His monologue about his childhood is very poignant and lacks pronouns. No. You know, the talking thing is something that I sort of — I pitch it and I take it away. It's moment to moment. Done wrong, it could kill ya.  So, I'm pretty leery about that. But Banner has a significant role, and the Hulk, you know, we really held back on him for a long while in the first one. That said, there's something terrible coming that you'll love.  And you know, just what makes the Hulk so hard to write is that you're pretending he's a werewolf when he's a superhero. You want it vice versa. You want to see him, Banner doesn't want to see him, but you don't want Banner to be that guy who gets in the way of you seeing him. So the question is, 'How has he progressed? How can we ring changes on what the Hulk does?' And that's not just in the screenplay. That's moment to moment, because you know that even when they are putting in post mix and temp mix, they have a library of two roars. 'Aaarrgh!  Uuurrgh!'  What if he wasn't roaring? I'm angry, and I'm not roaring. I'm being very polite to reporters, but I'm filled with rage.

Whedon says not having The Hulk appear in a new solo movie has actually made his job a little easier, when asked if he wanted to preserve the character for the AVENGERS movies.

Well, I wasn’t the one who said don’t make a Hulk film or anything like that. It was [Marvel head] Kevin [Feige] that said to me, 'We think right now it’s good to have somebody who we can only see in the Avengers.' Everybody loves Mark. He’s phenomenal. But the fact that, you know, there hasn’t been a Hulk since that Hulk…it doesn’t suck. I mean, my job is hard enough, you know. Cap’s had a movie, Thor’s had a movie. Everyone’s gone through big changes, Iron Man had a movie. So, you know, I have to juggle everybody’s perception of that while still making a movie that you can see having not seen any except the first Avengers, or not even that.

Earlier in the interview Joss Whedon also said he knew he wanted Vision and Ultron to appear in AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON before he even took THE AVENGERS gig, and came up with ideas for the sequel while hanging out in a pub.

Before I took the first job, I said, 'Well, I don’t know if I’m right for this, or if I want it, or you want me, but in the second one, the villain has to be Ultron, and he has to create the Vision.' And then it took me three years before I could tell Paul [Bettany] that I’d had that conversation, but after that, I stopped. I was like, that would be cool if you have Ultron, and you have Vision and Paul played him. And Scarlet Witch and Pietro, definitely. They’re from my era, they’re very different, their powers are different, it’s not all punching, it gives a different palette, so we can do more interesting things. It’s fun; those things were all those were absolutes. But then I didn’t actually want to make the film necessarily. I was ragged from the first one, and so I just turned off my brain. I was like, 'Do not think of cool ideas for the next one. Just get through this.' I thought, 'Is this something that makes sense in my life; do I have anything to say?' And so my agent called – I was in London – and he called me and said, 'There’s a deal that’s worth talking about – time to start to think about whether there’s a movie.' And I’m going, 'All right,' and I went to a pub, and sat down with my notebook, and about forty-five minutes later, my notebook was filled. And I texted my agent and said, 'Yup, and I have so many things to say.' And I was kind of surprised. It took me unawares. It was very beautiful.

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON is obviously going to do huge numbers at the box office when it hits theaters next year, and I'm confident it's going to be just as fun and thrilling as the first movie.

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON opens on May 5, 2015.