Joss Whedon Wants to Kill Everyone You Love

Joss Whedon, King of Fandom, is known among those who follow his work to be somewhat of a troll. Not the friendly kind of troll who'll share some of his bunt cake with you if you pass by his cave around lunch time. No, the mean kind who'll murder a few of your loved ones as toll for crossing his bridge. In other words: Joss Whedon is known for killing off favorite characters, and now he's talking about what it would be like to kill off an Avenger in the Avengers sequel.

Talking a few months back about what's to come in the sequel (which we now know will be called Age of Ultron), Whedon commented that his general philosophy on the next film was "Death, death and death." He might have been joking, but given his penchant for finding the tragic death element in his stories, his followers wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't, in fact, joking.

Now, Whedon's elaborating on what it would mean to feature the death of one of the world's favorite superheroes in the sequel, and whether he's up for the task:

I’m always joking about that. Um… maybe? But I’d have to have a really good reason, a really great sequence for [Marvel executives] to go, ‘We’ll cut off a potential franchise, that’s fine!’ They know, as any good studio does, that without some stakes, some real danger, how involved can we get? We don’t just rule it out across the board, but neither is the mission statement ‘Who can we kill?’ We try to build the story organically and go, ‘How hard can we make it on these people?’

From those comments, I'd say the chances are pretty good that we'll see our main Avengers team survive the 2015 film. Whether any more non-superheroed characters will die, I'm gonna go with: Probably.

As for what's up with fan-favorite villain Loki and his absence from Age of Ultron, Whedon also spoke up on that matter:

Every movie is going to be a different villain. Loki’s awesome, and he is awesome in Thor 2. But The Avengers is a different thing. I worked with Tom more than any other actor [in the last film], because he was the only villain and there were six heroes. And he was as great as anyone I’ve ever worked with, and I get why people loved the character. But it’s an Avengers movie.

We have to agree with Whedon here: It's hard to sit through any film that doesn't feature Tom Hiddleston, but not every film has time to be about the same emotionally damaged villain.