Joss Whedon

We've talked a bit about Joss Whedon in the Screenwriting section, but as the director of this little opus, this is the place where we get to talk about who he is and how he made The Avengers a massive slice of Awesome.

Show biz was in Mr. Whedon's blood, and he knew from a fairly early age that he was going to end up in Hollywood. His dad Tom wrote for popular sitcoms like Alice, and his grandfather John wrote scripts for The Dick Van Dyke Show. Joss started out following in their sitcom footsteps, with work on Roseanne.

In his copious free time, he worked as a script doctor, fixing problematic scripts and helping them flow more freely. He didn't get a lot of credit for it at the time, but it opened the door for his very first screenwriting credit: the original movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It wasn't a great experience for him—he's kind of down on the movie (which we admit we like more than he does)—but it opened more doors for him and further script work followed.

Behold the Power of Buffy

Despite his growing success as a movie scriptwriter, the whole Buffy thing still ate at him. Strangely enough, he got another shot at the character, pitching and ultimately being put in control of a new TV show featuring the character.

It was, to say the least, a smash, lighting a fire in the hearts of geeks everywhere and making an instant star out of Sarah Michelle Gellar, whose confident, capable Buffy become a feminist icon of the late 1990s.

That kept Whedon busy not only writing scripts, but directing episodes too, as well as similar work on the Buffy spin-off Angel and the short-lived-but-much-loved science fiction series Firefly. That, in turn, led to his first feature-directing job: the Firefly spin-off Serenity, which opened in 2005. The film did middling business at best, but with Buffy making history, no one much cared.

Comic Book Writer

It raised eyebrows, then, that this guy who seemed to have all of Hollywood at his feet, would step aside to write comic books for a while, but that's just what Whedon did.

From 2004 to 2008, he wrote X-Men comics for Marvel, as well as titles for Dark Horse comics and IDW Publishing. He cited Kitty Pryde—a famous teenage X-Man who can walk through walls—as one of his inspirations for Buffy. (Source)

More important, the gig gave him a chance to audition for his second directing gig… The Avengers. And no one knew at the time just what a great fit it turned out to be.

Why So Right?

You might think, at first glance, that hiring Whedon to handle a project this big was a roll of the dice. You'd be right.

Sure, he had plenty of directing experiences from Buffy to make up for his thin big-screen directing resume, and his love of comics was never up for debate. But seriously: this was a super ambitious project, and the monumental task of pulling four separate franchises together into one super-franchise would have left a lot of directors quaking in their puffy pants.

Not Whedon. He stepped up to the plate and knocked it out of the park, changing the history of movies in the process.

How exactly? It starts with the remarkable balance of characters onscreen. This is basically a movie with seven protagonists against one antagonist—a lot of balls to keep in the air. And yet you don't feel the strain for a single minute, and as the story unfolds, he moves back and forth naturally between all of his heroes.

In fact, all seven of the Avengers more or less have their own verbal confrontation with Loki…in a movie that barely has time for such shenanigans. Let's count off each confrontation in chronological order.

1. Hawkeye faces down Loki when he first arrives on Earth, only to become the Norse god's brainwashed slave.
2. Nick Fury gets a dig in after Hawkeye has been taken, followed by a second face-down when Loki's in the Hulk-busting cell on the Helicarrier.
3. Captain America throws down in Stuttgart, while Loki is telling everyone to bow and kneel.
4. Thor argues with Loki in the woods after Stuttgart. 
5. The Black Widow interrogates Loki in his cell, rope-a-doping him into revealing his plan for escape.
6. Iron Man has a drink with him in Stark Tower just before the final confrontation.
7. The Hulk beats him like a rented mule towards the end of the climactic showdown.

Not only does he pull it off, but he doesn't draw attention to the feat in any way. (Honestly, did you notice that before we mentioned it?)

If The Avengers is just popcorn entertainment, it's popcorn entertainment on a grand scale: unbelievably complex, horrendously expensive, involving the attentions of (literally) thousands of artists and technicians over the course of years.

Yet Whedon makes it feel like it's one guy telling you a story, and with that, The Avengers connected to its audience and went from an ambitious noise machine to something that would genuinely change the way movies were made.

It's hard to underestimate the impact he's had here, and yet maybe it's not as surprising as it seems. Hollywood's in Whedon's blood after all. Why wouldn't he turn one of that town's biggest gambles into an unqualified (Hulk) smash?