Joss Whedon most likely won’t be directing a Marvel movie anytime soon. He made his struggles with superheroics well known during Avengers: Age of Ultron, but folks at his annual hour long panel at San Diego Comic-Con’s coveted Hall H weren’t interested in his Marvel past.
Most people when they meet Whedon — Or sit in a massive convention room with a crowd twice as big as a WNBA game — want to know why he killed off Anya on Buffy. However, one Australian filmmaker in attendance didn’t care about Buffy or Willow and asked Whedon a serious question about how to make a living as an indie director. Particularly how to make a living when an audience can easily pirate their movie. Whedon for once didn’t have an answer right away, but he went on a tangent about some of the major problems currently plaguing Hollywood:
“It’s gotten to a state where movie studios are pretty relentless about trying to have an in before they start production. That’s not the case for all films, but it is the case for a ton of them, especially the big-budget ones. Part of the problem is there’s a dialogue going on between audiences and studios that is devolving, because they keep finding a lower common denominator. This doesn’t mean the films are bad — it just means that the ways in which they’re approaching what they’re going to make have become kind of ossified. At the same time, audiences are more likely to turn out for something that they already know or like. The problem is that there isn’t really a willingness by a lot of people to go into something that they don’t already know. None of this helps you by the way, sorry. But it’s something that needs to be addressed.”
There’s no denying it that audiences are more likely to go to a film for an established franchise. The top four box office hits of 2015 were all franchised films including Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. The Hollywood veteran did propose a cure for this ‘epidemic’ though and revolves around not giving too much away during trailers. Whedon started to wax nostalgic about how he used to watch films:
“You used to go to the movies and have no idea what you were going to see. I am actually old enough to have done this, to have gone to the local theater because something was playing. My parents would just send me by myself, rated-R, it didn’t matter, just get rid of him. That was the contract. I’ll go see the movie, I’ll open the box, I’ll see what’s inside. We don’t do that anymore. We keep making it harder to. I have trouble watching movies after I’ve seen the trailer, because I’ve seen the movie. Unfortunately, changing it means we have to find a platform that people will come to with that contract, that contract of I don’t know yet, as long as there are some parameters.”
Whedon also mentioned that his latest project is an historical fiction, “but isn’t an adaptation.” He also hinted that it’s going to be “very disturbing” and has been influenced by Eli Roth’s Aftershock, telling the massive audience,“Great writing doesn’t come from inspiration, it comes from something you watched.”
