Joss Whedon: The Dark Knight is The Godfather of Superhero Movies

“I watched The Dark Knight and I thought of that as riffing on the genre,” Whedon told The Huffington Post. “That was a superhero movie as The Godfather. And I was like, ‘But I just still want to see a superhero movie!’ We had just gotten the technology to make it awesome, and I wasn’t ready to be post-modern about it yet.”

That gels well with Marvel’s unself-conscious, humor-friendly approach to superhero films, certainly. 

Whedon added, “People come in with a certain amount of emotional baggage, so whether we’re in our larvae stage or our decadent stage, I can’t really say, but I try to make my superhero movies as if there’s either never been one or there’s only ever been them. I work with the idea that it’s just a natural way for people to be, so that you still make a movie about people.”

Avengers: Age of Ultron will be in theaters next year, reuniting Whedon with the cast of Marvel’s The Avengers and adding Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen as Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, Paul Bettany as The Vision and James Spader as the titular Ultron.