Unlike some filmmakers we could mention *cough*nolanandabrams*cough*, Joss Whedon is willing to just drop something pretty big and interesting about a project that isn’t due to hit theaters for two years yet. I’m not saying there isn’t room for more than one way to talk about your movie while it’s in production, I’m just saying…

I’m just saying it’s exciting to hear that we’re getting at least two female superheroes in The Avengers 2.

If you’ve been seeing a lot of news stories lately where Robert Downey, Jr. casually says something to the effect of “I’m not going to be playing Iron Man forever” or “yeah, I’d be interested in seeing who else could be Tony Stark,” it might be informative for you to remember that his contract actually is up to be renegotiated in this post Iron Man 3 era. These seemingly casual remarks are actually the first salvos in the epic game of moneyball that’s about to be played between Downey and Marvel Entertainment over what he’ll be paid to appear in The Avengers 2 and possibly The Avengers 3.

This means that some news outlets are pulling out all their unnamed sources to talk some straight insider talk about the contract negotiations between Downey, all of his Avengers co-stars, and Marvel. So you should take this with a grain of salt, but one of those news outlets is claiming that Marvel is mulling over script ideas for some pretty exciting secondary characters.

With Joss Whedon‘s mention, on the red carpet of Iron Man 3‘s Los Angeles premiere, that he’d managed to “lock” in his favorite brother/sister characters into the script for The Avengers 2, comics fans were very surprised, for a semi-complicated reason. It seemed very much like Whedon was hinting at the roles of Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, alias Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, reformed members of a terrorist group who were a major part of the second incarnation of the Avengers, lead by Captain America.

What’s surprising about this is that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are mutants, and were long thought to probably be characters that Marvel Entertainment couldn’t touch due to licensing agreements that left the X-Men and their supporting characters with Fox Studios. But was Whedon really hinting at Magneto’s wayward twins, or at a different sibling pair? According to Entertainment Weekly’s sources, it’s mutants all the way down.

The Iron Man 3 had its Los Angeles premiere last night, and that means that there were plenty of folks with an inside line on the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe walking down a gauntlet of reporters. It’s probably inevitable that somebody would drop a bombshell on the red carpet. When the dust cleared, Joss Whedon was standing alone, in his hand a direct quote about how the first draft of The Avengers 2 he’d locked in a new brother/sister duo for the film.

Before you go out and cross reference sibling teams and the Avengers in comics, you should probably just be told that the very likely culprits are Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. Which is very, very interesting from a licensing standpoint. I swear.

Part of me forgot Joss Whedon was already in the thick of planning The Avengers 2. Perhaps it’s because we’ve been focused on developments as they pertain to Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. lately. Regardless, the director recently discussed how things are going with that highly-anticipated film. 

Death, death and death. – Joss Whedon, in a funny voice, when asked what his general philosophy for Avengers 2 was.

You may have been seeing a headline going around saying that Joss Whedon promises a death in Avengers 2. You should know, just in case you already started buying stock in Kleenex, that he was joking.

Whedon was doing press for the European release of Much Ado About Nothing this weekend and was inevitably asked about what he had planned for Avengers 2. After delivering a nice and obviously vague answer about how it would be hard to make it “bigger” than The Avengers so he was going to make it “better,” the reporter persisted. So Whedon put on his best overly gloomy voice and deadpanned the above quote.

If you can get this SoundCloud recording of the Q&A to work (it’s getting hammered pretty hard right now), you can hear the exchange around the 14 minute mark.

Previously in The Avengers 2

In an interview with MTV, Marvel President Kevin Feige confirmed that Ant-Man will be the first movie in Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Three (which we kind of already knew), talked about how Iron Man 3 will connect with The Avengers sequel (potentially interesting…), and confirmed that Marvel’s planning a Doctor Strange movie for after Ant-Man.

One of those bits of news is far and away more exciting than the other two, and I don’t think I need to tell you which one.

“I’m as angry as you should be. … When I heard that I was like, ‘I wonder … no, I really can’t do that. Oh, I already have a job.’ I wouldn’t clear the Avengers. I’m having so much fun with that sequel right now, just with the script, that I couldn’t imagine not doing it.” — Joss Whedon on not being able to direct Star Wars: Episode VII because of the Avengers sequel. So J.J. Abrams and Guillermo del Toro were offered the movie but said no, and Whedon wanted to do it but can’t. Disney’s having worse luck than Jek Porkins during the Battle of Yavin.

(via: Cinema Blend)

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The Avengers sequel may not be in theaters until 2015 but that doesn’t mean Joss Whedon isn’t already working on it. Besides that, the director has a good deal on his plate including releasing Much Ado About Nothing to the masses this summer, launching S.H.I.E.L.D. on ABC, and perhaps starting work on the follow-up to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. How does he plan to do it all? 

Look, I was expecting to be reeling from a hurricane this morning. I wasn’t expecting to hit the end of my work day with the news that Disney now controls all of its own properties, those of Marvel comics, and those of Lucasfilm. But it’s true. As confirmed by Reuters and several legitimate business sources, Disney has acquired Lucasfilm, and with Lucasfilm the Star Wars franchise. They’re also promising Star Wars Episode 7 by 2015, the same year as The Avengers 2 and Warner Bros. putative Justice League.