Joss Whedon: The Biography (72 page)

The prominence of Black Widow also sparked conversation about the lack of female superheroes in feature films. In the past thirty years, an average of only two superhero movies per decade have centered on a female superhero:
Supergirl
(1984) and
Red Sonja
(1985);
Tank Girl
(1995) and
Barb Wire
(1996);
Catwoman
(2004) and
Elektra
(2005). The disappointing box office receipts of
Catwoman, Elektra
, and
Supergirl
in particular are held up in the industry as irrefutable evidence that a
female superhero film will never be successful—never mind that those films were just not very good. Joss never found such arguments persuasive. “Toymakers will tell you they won’t sell enough, and movie people will point to the two terrible superheroine movies that were made and say, You see? It can’t be done. It’s stupid,” he said.

“It’s frustrating to me that I don’t see anybody developing one of these movies,” he added. “It actually pisses me off. My daughter watched
The Avengers
and was like, ‘My favorite characters were the Black Widow and Maria Hill,’ and I thought, Yeah, of course they were. I read a beautiful thing Junot Diaz wrote: ‘If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.’” But perhaps Joss’s film would inspire a change for the better: in February 2014, Kevin Feige announced that Johansson would have an expanded role in several upcoming films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and that Marvel had begun development on a Black Widow solo film. Still, with just one female superhero story in the earliest stages of development, the studio and the industry have a long way left to go.

Four days after
The Avengers
opened, as the massive international media blitz was reaching its peak, Joss made a very personal post on Whedonesque. It had the typical wit and self-effacing humor of a Joss screed (“People have told me that this matters, that my life is about to change. I am sure that is true…. I think—not to jinx it—that I may finally be recognized at Comic-Con. Imagine!”), yet in the middle he dropped the quips to pen an incredibly direct message of gratitude to those who had supported him long before he had the world’s biggest superheroes doing his bidding:

What doesn’t change is anything that matters. What doesn’t change is that I’ve had the smartest, most loyal, most passionate, most articulate group of—I’m not even gonna say fans. I’m going with “peeps”—that any cult oddity such as my bad self could have dreamt of. When almost no one was watching, when people probably should have STOPPED watching, I’ve had three constants: my family and friends, my collaborators (often the same), and y’all. A lot of stories have come out about my “dark years,” and how I’m “unrecognized” … I love these stories, because they make me seem super-important, but I have never felt the darkness (and I’m ALL about my darkness) that they described. Because I have so much.
I have people, in my life, on this site, in places I’ve yet to discover, that always made me feel the truth of success: an artist and an audience communicating. Communicating to the point of collaborating. I’ve thought, “maybe I’m over; maybe I’ve said my piece.” But never with fear. Never with rancor. Because of y’all. Because you knew me when. If you think topping a box office record compares with someone telling you your work helped them through a rough time, you’re probably new here…. So this is me, saying thank you. All of you. You’ve taken as much guff for loving my work as I have for over-writing it, and you deserve, in this our time of streaming into the main, to crow. To glow. To crow and go “I told you so,” to those Joe Blows not in the know.

The Avengers
was an instant smash, earning more than $1 billion in just nineteen days. It would go on to become the third-highest-grossing film in history—both domestically and worldwide (among numerous other records, including best opening weekend and opening week for any film). And Joss had delivered it on schedule and under budget. So the fact that the studio asked him to sign on for an
Avengers
sequel was hardly unexpected. What was a little less certain was whether he would accept.

While the business details were being worked out on both sides, Joss knew that he wouldn’t make the deal if he didn’t have another story to tell about this dysfunctional family. A few days after
The Avengers
premiered, Joss told the
L.A. Times
that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to dive back so quickly into that universe. “I’m very torn,” Joss said. “It’s an enormous amount of work telling what is ultimately somebody else’s story, even though I feel like I did get to put myself into it. But at the same time, I have a bunch of ideas, and they all seem really cool.”

When Joss gave himself a tiny break in a London pub to think about those ideas, he realized that he couldn’t leave the Avengers behind so easily. Within forty minutes, fueled by fish and chips and a pint, he’d filled a notebook with his ideas for the future of the superhero team. He texted agent Chris Harbert and told him to make the deal.

“I’m so in love with that universe and the characters and the way they were played and I have so much more I want to do with them,” Joss said. “I know I can’t match the success of the first one but I can try to make a
better film and that’s what I’m excited about, that’s the new room of fear I’m entering now.”

In July, Joss returned to San Diego Comic-Con, the place where he had reconnected with the Marvel world through Joe Quesada in 2003 and announced that he was indeed writing and directing
The Avengers
in 2010. Comic book conventions had been a part of his blood since he was ten years old, and young Joss could never have imagined the fan response he’d get at them almost forty years later.

“I don’t know how he does it, really. He’ll wait until the end and sign everything,” Kai says. “He never complains about the attention he gets. The only thing that he actually sort of laments is not being able to geek out on other people. He can’t go to the tables and see the stuff that he wants to see. But it’s his job and he really loves it and he loves the fans and he appreciates what he’s got. [There are] other people who complain about it and whine about it, but he’s like, ‘No, this is why we’re here. Without them, we wouldn’t have anything.’”

Not that Joss always got recognized at the big geek love-in. Just a year earlier, he’d showed up at one of the San Diego Comic-Con parties with the cast of
Dollhouse
and Drew Goddard. The doorman didn’t recognize him and refused them all entry. “I’m standing there,” Goddard remembers. “I’m like, ‘Do you guys understand? This is … everyone in that party was …’” He laughs.

Joss didn’t play the “Don’t you know who I am?” card. He turned to his group and said, “OK, well, we’ll just go make our own party.”

“I feel like that summarizes Joss better than anything I’ve ever seen,” Goddard says. “There was no anger at not getting into the party. It was just, ‘You know what? Let’s just go make our own party. It’ll be fun.’ And it was. It was way more fun than I’m sure that party was. But I will never forget being at Comic-Con and being like, ‘Oh, you didn’t hear? People are still not letting him in.’”

There was no question that Joss would be allowed into the party this year, but the biggest and most emotional moment was the
Firefly
reunion panel. Ten years after the series was canceled, over four thousand fans packed the hall, many of whom had slept in line the night before to ensure they’d get a seat. In the middle of the night, Joss went out to the
line to thank them. Later that day, the panel moderator asked Joss what the fans meant to him. Joss broke down and wept, speechless. The audience of four thousand Browncoats stood up and roared.

A month later, Marvel announced that they were expanding their relationship with Joss. He would again write and direct his family of superheroes in the
Avengers
sequel, which reunites the superhero team after a two-year string of other Marvel projects:
Iron Man 3
(2013),
Thor: The Dark World
(2013),
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
(2014), and
Guardians of the Galaxy
(2014). And he’d be overseeing Marvel’s venture into prime-time television. First they’d worked together on comics, then films, and next up Joss was developing a series for ABC that would give the secret agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. a chance to be more than superhero support staff.

The S.H.I.E.L.D. project was not something new; Marvel and ABC had been working on it for some time (along with a proposed reboot of
The Incredible Hulk
). When the studio talked to Joss about it, he was initially wary that they were jumping into it because they had a deal with Disney, which owned both Marvel and ABC. “A good opportunity to make a show is not a good reason to make a show,” he explained. And he was a little thrown by their requirement that the series feature Agent Coulson—especially since Joss had killed him off, at Marvel’s request, in the movie. Yet it was the presence of Coulson that convinced him the series could work. In
The Avengers
, Coulson is the “little guy” among superheroes, and Joss loved the idea of him being “the common man in an uncommon world.” “He’s an enthusiast,” Joss said. “And he loves this world as well as wanting to protect the people in it.” That’s a rather apt description of Joss as well.

Joss wanted to extend that same “little guy” feel to the series as a whole. After all, without the main Avengers, what would be the draw of a series filled with people who had been mostly supporting characters and extras in the films? “Well, what does S.H.I.E.L.D. have that the other superheroes don’t?” Joss asked. “And that, to me, is that they’re not superheroes. But they live in that universe. Even though they’re a big organization, that [lack of powers] makes them underdogs, and that’s interesting to me.”

Joss pitched his ideas for the series to Marvel Television—which was headed by Jeph Loeb, his former collaborator on the
Buffy
animated series. Loeb was on board, so Joss was set to direct the pilot. He brought along
Dr. Horrible
coconspirators Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen to write and produce, along with
Angel
executive producer Jeffrey Bell.

The biggest draw for fans, aside from Joss himself, was the return of Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson. “We all love Clark Gregg, there’s no doubt about that,” Joss said in a taped announcement at the Marvel TV panel at 2012 New York Comic Con. “From before we made
The Avengers
, we discussed whether there was a way for him to be a part of the Marvel Universe, perhaps a part of a TV show even after his death.” The casting announcement was met with an outpouring of cheers.