The Avengers swoops into UK cinemas in just over a month and director Joss Whedon has been speaking about the amount of material he had to edit out of his final cut, as well as clarifying the situation with Loki’s army.
“There’s a lot of me that got cut out,” explains Whedon, "but I think part of the process in a situation like this is you make the movie, you make your movie, then you remove yourself out of the equation. You go, ‘you know what, the Avengers are more important than I am so these things that I’m obsessed with aren’t necessarily moving the story forward, and therefore they are baggage.’”
So will we ever get to see the stuff Whedon cut out of the movie? Well, possibly as deleted scenes, but not as part of a director’s cut…
“I believe very strongly in putting the director’s cut into the theatres,” says Whedon. “I believe that the director’s cut is the best movie for the studio and the best version of the movie for the audience. I’ve never really been in a situation where I had to pull the beating heart out of something that I did.”
As well as discussing the editing process, Whedon went on to talk a little more about Loki’s army, taking the opportunity to put rumours of the Skrulls to bed once and for all.
“It is not the Kree or the Skrulls,” he said. “Those two aliens are Marvel mainstays and have enormous backstories. They have a big life of their own that just could not be contained in a film where I already had seven movie stars… The Skrulls - they can shape change. That’s a whole thing. I’ve already got Loki. He’s got magic. Once you got magic along with your Iron Man and your Black Widow - it’s a real juggling act.”
Frost Giants then, anyone? We’ll find out for sure when the film opens in the UK on 27 April 2012.
