Joss Whedon Predicted People Getting Bored Of Star Wars And Marvel
Would he direct a Boba Fett movie if asked?
When The Avengers hit theaters, its success surprised pretty much everybody. The Marvel movie was the culmination of five years of world-building after the release of the first Iron Man movie in 2008.
The Avengers quickly became the third highest-grossing film of all time with a $1.5 billion worldwide box office. At the time Joss Whedon would have a hand in every Marvel movie close future. Needless to say, he could do anything he wanted in Hollywood (times have changed), but one of those things would not be a Star Wars movie.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the geek icon talked about the dangers of making too many movies based on existing geek properties (even Marvel ones). While Whedon’s next film was The Avengers: Age of Ultron, the director was reluctant to take on another big franchise.
Joss Whedon said at the time, “There’s probably a dozen [properties I’d like to play with]. It’s very important I don’t do that. It’s very important that we start creating new content again. We can only build on nostalgia so much before we have nothing left to build on. Before we’re rebooting Spider-Man — again. It’s dangerous to the culture, and it’s boring to me. I squeezed in between my Avengers movies a 400-year-old play (Much Ado About Nothing). So I really need to create some new worlds.”
But when the interviewer responded with, “So if Disney said, ‘Here’s the Boba Fett movie,’ you’d say no?” After some consideration and after being painted into a corner with the question, Joss Whedon answered with a very sincere comment. “I can’t say for sure, because that’s a tasty morsel. But right now, my heart doesn’t go that way,” said Whedon.
I believe Joss Whedon when he says he doesn’t want to do another big franchise movie after The Avengers, but who could pass up the opportunity to direct a Star Wars movie?
It seems like Joss didn’t need to direct a Star Wars movie. It would be the other way around, with Disney needing Joss to direct the hypothetical movie instead.
After the early successful premiere of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., it seemed like Joss had even more power in Hollywood, but Star Wars didn’t sound like it’s in the cards for the director.
That said, we should have probably waited until The Avengers: Age of Ultron before getting carried away with what Whedon would do next.
Perhaps we’re missing the forest for the trees here, but it seems like Joss Whedon was right about building off nostalgia. At the moment, we were the middle of a new Spider-Man franchise that was rebooted only five years after the previous Spider-Man film in 2007.
And we were about to see Batman rebooted with Superman Vs. Batman, only three years after The Dark Knight Rises came out. Maybe we should let Whedon create those new worlds for everyone to enjoy instead.
And when it came to franchise fatigue, Joss Whedon was definitely right about that. From that point on it was pretty much a non-stop stream of Star Wars and Marvel movies and series. Fan excitement wained and that’s a hard thing to bring back. Nostalgia always wins and too much of it can be a bad thing.
