Will Joss Whedon's departure signal doom for Marvel?

Posted Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 8:26 AM Central
Last updated Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 8:27 AM Central

by John Couture

In the old riddle about the chicken and the egg, the point is that the answer doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what came first because the status quo is a perpetual momentum in which they both coexist and reality without one or the other is not possible. With no eggs, there will be no chickens and vice versa.

So too, Marvel will face an interesting dilemma moving forward from Avengers: Age of Ultron. For the first time since its inception, key creative figure Joss Whedon will not be involved directly in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). He is still involved to a degree with the TV series spinoff Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and perhaps he will get more involved with that (or less), but his future plans are cloudy at best.

What will only add to the unknown is the fact that Whedon abondoned his twitter this week leaving many to wonder if the timing is related to his departure from the MCU. It may be completely unrelated as he did stir up a bit of controversy when he accused a clip (see below) from Jurassic World as being "'70s era sexist."

I'm certainly not going to step into the fray on this, but I will say that my immediate reaction to Joss' comments remain true. It's hard to draw any conclusions from a two minute clip from a two hour film without the proper context. That being said, Joss has written some of the best female characters ever to see the light of day on TV, so I'm certainly not going to claim that I know anything more on the subject than he does.

After this tweet (since deleted with the rest of his account, but you can find it preserved online with a simple Google search), there seemed to be a marked change in the tone of his comments, especially towards Marvel. He came out and said point blank that Edgar Wright's Ant-Man script was the best script that Marvel ever had. There's no mixing words on that one. He felt that Marvel made a mistake in parting ways with Wright and with his own exit from the MCU looming, he was no longer censoring his feelings.

It's being reported that Joss and Marvel execs butted heads over several artistic decisions concerning Avengers: Age of Ultron and it's easy to see that these may have left a bad taste in the director's mouth. The timing of his twitter departure (right after Avengers: Age of Ultron debuted in theaters) seems to be the most damning evidence of all that the creative genius is not leaving on good terms.

To be fair, Joss reached out to BuzzFeed and emphatically denied that his departure from Twitter had anything to do with feminist backlash over Avengers: Age of Ultron, and while that might be true, the timing still makes one think that it was related in some way to his leaving the Marvel universe.

So, what does Joss Whedon's departure mean for the future of the MCU? Can they both co-exist or like in the riddle of the chicken and the egg, will one's disappearance necessitate the extinction of the other? As with many things in life, only time will tell.