Joss Whedon explored a lot of "insane iterations" before writing the final script for ‘The Avengers’.
The 53-year-old director wrote and directed the 2012 superhero hit – but Joss has admitted to agonising about the script and scraping a lot of his original ideas along the way.
He shared: "At the very beginning, I wrote entire drafts that had no bearing on what I would eventually film.
"There was a moment where we thought we weren’t gonna have Scarlett [Johansson], and so I wrote a huge bunch of pages starring The Wasp. That was not useful.
"I also worried that one British character actor was not enough to take on Earth’s mightiest heroes, and that we’d feel like we were rooting for the overdog. So I wrote a huge draft with Ezekiel Stane, Obadiah Stane’s son, in it."
Joss’ initial troubles centered on the idea that a lot of the different superheroes didn’t "belong in the same movie".
But, ultimately, the director recognised that their contrasting personalities could be the strength of the film.
Joss – who is a long-time comic book enthusiast – told Thrillist: "I used to read The Avengers and love it, but I didn’t have the emotional connection to it that I did to certain books.
"It was just grand sci-fi spectacle and had all the heroes I liked. But my thought was these guys just don’t belong together. Then I was like, ‘Wait a minute, that’s the movie. It’s ‘The Dirty Dozen’.’"
Joss Whedon recalls his ‘insane iterations’ of The Avengers
