All Hail Sir Whedon

Okay, well, maybe not really Sir Whedon since he’s American and the British have rules about that sort of thing. But seriously? Is there anything he can’t do? From Buffy to Firefly to the weird train wreck that was his Dollhouse experiment, this is a man who knows how to write great dialogue, create compelling characters and, okay, sometimes it seems like he writes his stories around his love for special effects (Agents of Shield first season, anyone?).

Regardless, it’s quickly becoming clear that, even though he hasn’t yet made a movie guaranteed to make a man cry, if his name is on something it is bound to be good–at least on some level.

We’re talking about The All Mighty and Powerful Whedon Today because the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer (a few of them, actually) is finally out and…can we just buy all the movie tickets now, please?

There is a lot of great stuff happening in this movie. It looks like Black Widow is going to have more of a role, which is good; the first Avengers didn’t utilize the female Avengers nearly enough (which is strange because–while the individual character movies didn’t exactly set it up to do so–Whedon is one of the few Hollywood producers who will happily create stories centering on awesome female protagonists). James Spader also looks a lot more promising than originally imagined. Hearing his voice in the third trailer gave us chills and made us go “Okay. Yes. James Spader wins all the things. This was a good choice.”

That’s usually how it goes with Whedon, though. You hear about the idea behind his current project and you think “um. Okaaaaaay?” but then you watch it and you go “Holy heck, give that guy more money!”  Admit it: weren’t you skeptical when you heard there was a guy who was turning Buffy the Vampire Slayer into a series and that it was going to air on a teen channel? And look how that turned out! Buffy is iconic–even to people outside the Geekosphere.

Another good example of this is Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. A lot of people were understandably irritated with him for releasing his web series during the infamous Writer’s Strike of 2008. It was supposed to be pencils down all around but here came Whedon with a series for the web because, at that time, even though Dr. Horrible Co-Star Felicia Day’s web series The Guild had already been around for a year, web series were still mostly unheard of/not considered real entertainment. This was before YouTube really took off, remember.

Our all around love for the Amazing Joss isn’t just because of the stories he tells or his film making skills. Joss is also very vocal in his support of feminism and the women who work along side of him and in front of his cameras. He’s been trying longer than anyone to make a Wonder Woman movie. There are talks about him hopefully making a Captain Marvel movie (now that the television series has helped launch the character for new fans who might not be comics nerds).

He has also been very vocal about his disgust for the GamerGate movement, being one of several celebrities to call out the movement as a hate mob and taking steps to make sure everybody knows that he does not support or condone their actions.