After guiding The Avengers to be the biggest superhero movie ever with $1.5B, Joss Whedon didn't need to return for Avengers: Age of Ultron. Surely trying to top it would be a foolish errand, right? Obviously he doesn't think so, and reveals to Empire that he's got a few new tricks up his sleeve to push the sequel over the top. One of those tricks is taking a page right out of the James Bond playbook for what he calls a "pre-credit Bondian blow-out"...
"The James Bond theme has come up more than a few times, mainly because the locations are so beautiful and in particular the opening location is really stunning. There was a moment where there were soldiers and different kinds of people fighting them, and these guys in winter camo come up on a castle in one of those mountain resort elevators that goes side-to-side and looks like a gumball machine, and I was looking at the Italian Alps and the mist and the castle, and this weird thing rises up, full of soldiers in winter camo, and everybody was like… [sings the Bond theme]."
If Whedon wanted to raise the bar to an impossible degree, referencing The Godfather Part II as a story influence would be a great way to do it, but he goes and does it anyway!
"I know I reference Godfather Part II a lot. ‘Don't reference the greatest movie ever made because that’s Icarus, you moron!’ But at the same time it is a huge touchstone for me because you get everything you got from the first Godfather movie in a very different movie, in a movie that structurally couldn’t be more different, and thematically and in intent and in mood, and yet nobody ever goes, ‘It wasn’t Godfathery enough.’ I need to give people an exciting ride about heroic people, and that’s certainly part of why I signed on, but at the same time a richer, deeper, darker movie is not a bad thing."
There's nothing rich, deep, or dark about the new Avengers: Age of Ultron poster. It's too crowded to be anything more than a Photoshopped mess. The problem with having so many A-listers crammed into one movie is they need to be in every promo, and well, this is the result. Avengers: Age of Ultron opens May 1st.
