Joss Whedon and Zak Penn

Penn Station

Whedon also served as the director, and there's more on his directing abilities over in the pertinent section, but he also has a reputation as a fantastic screenwriter. (Meanwhile, we're patting ourselves on the back for not burning our microwave popcorn—it takes all types.)

When they brought him on to helm The Avengers, Marvel knew they were getting him for screenwriting duties. That's good value for the money…especially considering what a huge comic book nerd Whedon is.

In this case, however, he didn't start from scratch. From the earliest days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the producers imagined an Avengers movie, and initially signed screenwriter Zak Penn to put it all together. Penn was no stranger to comic book movies, having worked on earlier Marvel joints like X2: X-Men United, X3: The Last Stand, Elektra, and The Incredible Hulk.

He knew the territory and had a reputation as a team player (sharing writing credits on many of his scripts). Marvel tagged him with writing The Avengers in 2007, before any of their movies had so much as seen the inside of a theater.

And unfortunately, whatever magic they were looking for just wasn't there. Enter Whedon, who signed on to direct and got handed the script to rewrite as well. He responded…by throwing the whole thing out and starting again. Penn had solved some of the structural issues involved with cramming seven standalone heroes into one movie, but the rest of it was left to Whedon to completely rework.

Whedon, thankfully, was ready to go. Having earned his reputation with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show, he had come off of a four-year stint writing the X-Men comics over at Marvel, and the dude definitely had superheroes in his DNA. He kept the basic arc together—good guys squabble and fight before coming together as a team—and infused it with a lot of his own pop culture sensibilities.

Light and Snark

You can see signs of that in the dialogue, where the characters make specific in-jokes about other movies, TV shows…things we might have seen and which Whedon can evoke from an angle, making them clever and funny without being obvious about it. Tony Stark makes a good means of doing that, since he has a lot of Whedon-style snark in him.

Look at how Tony takes a playful swipe at Thor's blonde locks, for example:

TONY STARK: No hard feelings Point Break.You've got a mean swing.

(For the uninitiated, Point Break is a ripe slice of cinematic cheese from 1990, starring Patrick Swayze as a bank robbing surfer and Keanu Reeves as the undercover FBI Agent out to bring him down. Yes, really. Swayze's shaggy mane looks quite a bit like Hemsworth's in this movie.)

He repeats the trick with a reference that most of us can get…even unfrozen super-soldiers from the 40s.

NICK FURY: I'd like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys.

THOR: Monkeys? I do not understand.

STEVE ROGERS: I do! I understood that reference.

What's the point of references like that, besides the way they give the audience a chuckle? They make these heroes more relatable. (And muscle-bound millionaire superheroes need all the relatability points they can get.)

Beyond that, Whedon's screenplay has a nice sense of balance to it. The characters are sharply defined, the action scenes don't dominate the quieter dialogue sequences, and every hero gets his or her chance to shine without being overshadowed. (More on that in the Directors section.) It progresses organically, it holds together in the right places, and it delivers a lot of crowd-pleasing entertainment with just the right amount of heart.

Sure, you can complain about how superficial the script can be, how it focuses on the surface details without delving deeper into the Very Important Stuff that we expect from the Great Cinema.

But at the same time, that may be asking a little too much from a screenplay that already has a huge number of characters to juggle and does so with so much elegance and grace that you're scarcely aware of how hard the trick is. Whedon makes it look easy…and doesn't forget to tell a genuine comic book story in the process. (Source)