The Hollywood Reporter‘s Heat Vision blog today reported that multi-talented Joss Whedon is in final talks to direct Marvel’s upcoming hero team-up movie The Avengers, set to premiere the first weekend of May 2012.
Mike Fleming, who reported the news for Deadline.com, calls Whedon “an interesting choice” because “despite his writing/producing TV series resume, his lone feature directing effort, Serenity, was not a hit.”
Marvel has no comment as yet, but Whedon’s involvement would skyrocket my interest in the movie as a Buffy, Angel, and Firefly fan. True, Serenity was not a box office hit, but the Avengers are probably more popular to begin with than Firefly was. I thought Jon Favreau was an interesting choice to direct Iron Man. I didn’t expect it to be a hit, and since then I’ve been more apt to trust Marvel’s judgment picking directors.
Zap2it.com’s Rick Porter further reports that Zak Penn is writing the Avengers script.
I would go to this on day one!
JW gets my coin for pretty much anything he does.
To me, this seems like an ideal thing for Joss.
He has a tremendous amount of critical capitial, but has not coverted that to commercial success (outside of Buffy and, to a lesser extent, Angel).
This would do for him what Spidey did for Rami: Give him some box office clout.