AGE OF
ULTRON.

A THREE-YEAR DEAL AND FIVE MONTHS ON THE ROAD

HOW WHEDON TOOK A BIGGER FILM TO FIVE LOCATIONS

Marvel Studios signed Joss Whedon in August 2012 to a three-year deal to write and direct the sequel to The Avengers. The same deal had him co-create the ABC series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. with his brother Jed Whedon and sister-in-law Maurissa Tancharoen. For the next few years he was writing a film that had to answer the first one while a series ran under his name.

Whedon spent five months filming in South Africa, South Korea, Bangladesh, Italy and London. Seoul accounts for 20 minutes of the finished film, including Captain America and Black Widow speeding after Ultron down the main street in Gangnam.

Whedon also added three major characters to the ensemble: Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch and the Vision. A sequel that had to follow the first film’s team also had to introduce newcomers.

A STONE FROM STRUCKER’S LAB AND TWO CHARACTERS CLAIMED BY TWO STUDIOS

WHERE ULTRON AND THE MAXIMOFF TWINS CAME FROM

The setup came from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, whose mid-credits scene shows Baron Strucker holding Loki’s scepter and ends on the twins. Age of Ultron opens in that same HYDRA base. After the Avengers take the scepter back, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner use the gem in it, later identified as the Mind Stone, to start the peacekeeping program that becomes Ultron.

Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, played by Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, were not simply Marvel’s to use. Kevin Feige described an arrangement with Fox: Marvel Studios could use the twins with the Avengers but could not refer to their mutant or Magneto-related lineage, and Fox could do the opposite. The film therefore gives them an origin in HYDRA’s experiments with the scepter’s gem, not in mutation.

The overlap was visible on screen. Fox’s X-Men: Days of Future Past had reached cinemas in May 2014, just under a year earlier, with Evan Peters as its own Quicksilver. Marvel’s version does not survive Age of Ultron. After release, Whedon justified that death by pointing to Seven Samurai, where the old guys say they made it through and the young guys tend to miss the mark, and said a war movie needs a sacrifice.

A VILLAIN CAPTURED ON SET AND A VOICE THAT GOT A BODY

HOW JAMES SPADER AND PAUL BETTANY WERE CAPTURED

James Spader played Ultron on set, not in a booth. He said in October 2014 that the crew would “dot me up” and fit him with a helmet carrying two cameras on his face, which could stream to a monitor so they could try different things. He shot scenes with the other actors while the crew was “recording all of it, including my voice,” and by his account the film did not use re-recorded dialogue nine times out of ten.

The effects scale matched. Ben Snow, ILM’s visual effects supervisor, said ILM handled 800 of the film’s roughly 3,000 effects shots and that Ultron Prime was the most complex hero character the company had built, with 2,000 controllers, 600 of them in his face. Snow said ILM’s animators studied Spader’s performance and reproduced it on the face.

Paul Bettany had voiced J.A.R.V.I.S. in the Iron Man films and The Avengers. Bettany said in July 2014 that Marvel had rules against actors playing multiple characters, but that he and Whedon got on very well and Whedon looked for a way to make it happen and found one. He said he got a call on a Friday night asking if he wanted to be the Vision. In the film, the J.A.R.V.I.S. program becomes the core of Vision, who carries the scepter’s gem in his forehead.

A FIRST ASSEMBLY OF OVER THREE HOURS

WHAT WHEDON CUT, AND WHAT IT COST HIM

Whedon’s first cut ran to more than three hours, and his own wish to make the sequel shorter than the first film meant losing much of the character-building. He later put the length at three hours and fifteen minutes, not three and a half.

He named specific losses. After release he said that when the bedroom scene between Banner and Natasha Romanoff was first shot, the question was answered and he rejected her, and that he “hated to cut” it because Marvel suggested withholding the resolution. He also said the dreams were not an executive favourite and that he fought for the dreams and the farmhouse, and that the negotiation over Thor’s cave scene became “really unpleasant.”

“I made the idiotic mistake of trying to make a great movie.”

Joss Whedon, in a BuzzFeed News profile published in April 2015

He was blunter about the toll a year later. At the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2016 he said he was so “beaten down by the process” that he felt like a miserable failure, which he put down partly to conflicts with Marvel and partly to dissatisfaction with his own work. A year earlier he had described feeling every day, while living in Burbank, that he had not done enough.

THE REWATCH

A SECOND-BEST OPENING, A SPLIT CRITICAL VERDICT AND A GAUNTLET

Avengers: Age of Ultron opened to $191.3 million in the US, then the second-biggest opening weekend of all time, behind The Avengers, and crossed $1 billion worldwide on its 24th day of release, the third Marvel Studios film to do so after The Avengers and Iron Man 3. It earned $459.0 million domestically and $946.0 million internationally, for $1.405 billion worldwide, a total that includes a small 2020 re-release of $3,748.

Reviews were positive but a step below those for The Avengers. Rotten Tomatoes lists a 75% critics’ score from 374 reviews, with a consensus calling the film “overstuffed but mostly satisfying.” Metacritic’s Metascore is 66 from 49 critic reviews. Among them, Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times called it a “surprisingly touching and even romantic adventure.”

A post-credits scene shows Thanos retrieving a gauntlet without stones and saying, “Fine. I’ll do it myself.” The Russo brothers, who had directed Captain America: The Winter Soldier, officially signed on that April to direct the two-part Infinity War. Whedon told the Tribeca audience he would not direct future Marvel projects. Joe Russo later said he thought the gauntlet was connected to Eitri, who forged it.

For a first watch, it sits in the Marvel movies in release order guide directly after Guardians of the Galaxy, with Ant-Man next, and in the MCU release order and MCU movies-only order guides, again directly after Guardians of the Galaxy.