Avengers: Age of Ultron - Marvel's Feige Talks Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, The Title and More

In a new interview with SFX Magazine, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige opened up more than he's done before about Avengers: Age of Ultron, including explaining why the title was taken from a comic book miniseries that doesn't seem to have anything much to do with the film. "We didn't want to merely have a '2' after Avengers so we wanted to give it a subtitle," the exec told SFX. "We have various things that we were looking at and Age of Ultron - which just happened to be a the name of a comic book series as well - was our favorite." He revealed a number of other minor details as well, including the fact that villain James Spader was another of the actors that Marvel had been wanting to work with, but that the right part just hadn't come up yet.

Telling the magazine that Spader fit with director Joss Whedon's vision of Ultron, Feige explained, "Joss Whedon had a great idea for the character and how to use him to unify the Avengers again and acquire their services once more. He was a favorite. Joss and I were on the production of the first Avengers movie and we started having conversations about Ultron, and how he could come about and how we could adapt his origin to the continuity of the cinematic universe. It literally was just little discussions between takes but thankfully Joss files all that kind of stuff away in his brain. Then when the time arrived, he started [outlining] it, so he went back to that and built a very good story." The other major addition to the cast for the next film, of course, is Wanda and Pietro Maximoff--Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. They're a particularly odd couple, because they exist in a legal no man's land where both Marvel Studios and 20th Century Fox have the rights to use them for the Avengers and X-Men films, respectively. The first image of Bryan Singer's Quicksilver from X-Men: Days of Future Past was officially released today, but both he and his sister are expected to play fairly key roles in Avengers: Age of Ultron. "It's always a balance with any movie, not to overwhelm it with too many story elements," Feige said when asked whether adding yet more Avengers (Rhodey Rhodes and Falcon are also rumored to appear in the film). "Certainly when it comes to comic book movies, you can fall into the trap of having too many villains and in the case of team-based movies, having too many heroes. But what Joss has in mind to bring those characters into the story happens in a very natural fashion over the course of the story. It's also the tradition of the Avengers to switch up the roster every now and again and to have new characters coming in. It's just part of the fun, but we wouldn't have included them if it had just been a case of 'Oh, we want two new figures, two new costumes.' It very much flows with the story that Joss is creating."