Jeremy here...
Up until about a couple of months before its theatrical release, Marvel's AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON was a much longer film, running somewhere in the neighborhood of 170 minutes. This would've made it the longest Marvel Studios release by far, placing it in the long-winded realm of an average HARRY POTTER flick. Did the film need those extra thirty minutes? Would Marvel be open to re-inserting them for the upcoming Blu-ray release?
Right now, there's one person who has zero interest in an AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON Director's Cut, and that's writer-director Joss Whedon. In a Nerd HQ Q&A at last week's San Diego Comic Con (covered by Collider), Whedon rather definitively expressed his opposition to a new cut.
"It has always been my ambition never to do a director’s cut of anything," said Whedon, "And always to make the movie with the studio that we both want to make." He went on to joke that he's "super fucking lazy", but then very seriously defended the theatrical cut of the movie. "The fact that Marvel gave me that opportunity and supported it, I’m very happy and very proud of everybody that worked on it. I don’t feel the need to go in and fix. I feel like, there she is."
Interestingly, Whedon called AGE OF ULTRON "one of the most ridiculously personal things I've ever put on screen." As he went through rewrites, I think he found the heart of the screenplay in The Vision, who has most of the best scenes in the movie. I still think the movie is a mixed bag, and I hate that Whedon excised what would've been - no hyperbole - the most rousing superhero moment in superhero movie history, but I'm sure Marvel had their reasons for dropping it (in case you're wondering, the moment in question was never filmed).
I don't think thirty extra minutes would fix my problems with AGE OF ULTRON, but I wouldn't mind seeing how it played before Marvel and Whedon whittled it down to its final run time. Alas, it sounds like we'll just have to make do with deleted scenes.
