I shall now pre-judge Avengers 2: Age of Marketing

I could try to keep this fair and balanced and not let the fact that Joss Whedon is an uninformed jackass running his mouth to his millions of mouth-breathing fans too lazy to fact-check about GamerGate influence my opinion of the things he does, but I'm not going to.

So anyway the greatest accomplishment of Avengers 1: Look What Our Lawyers Can Do was putting six superheroes on a team together. The film was written and directed by a man who primarily did ensemble-show-style television as well as a really good Space Western movie that completely failed to recoup its budget at the box office. Unsurprisingly, the film lacks a single protagonist and the guy who gets the most character development is the one a) whose superpower is anger, and b) who's played by a different actor this time around.

Compare Avengers 1 to Captain America 2 and the shortcomings of the Whedon approach become rather obvious. Even though Cap 2 is supposed to be a standalone film, not only did it flesh out more of the MCU world, but it also changed more of the MCU world than Avengers 1 did. The reason why they were able to do this might be because they were focusing on a much smaller group of characters, and actually had a few themes to explore, rather than the old "group of badasses having pissing contests" that everyone got sick of midway through Buffy.

The good news is that in Avengers 2, there are going to be even more characters to crowd out each other. All so that Marvel can sell more toys. Now, maybe this is Marvel's idea, in which case, yeah, the guy famous for long-term character arcs in ensemble shows might make a bit of sense to write and direct. If that's the case, then Whedon comes off as the MCU's version of the Pierce Brosnan Bond: a that'll-do personage who can't live up to the hype, but that's okay because it's not like you could realistically expect someone else to do better in his constraints. (I mean, Casino Royale is basically TWINE done right, but it's not like changing Bonds was the only thing they did.)

But serious question, given that Whedon's magnum opus was and in my opinion remains Buffy the Vampire Slayer, why haven't they assigned him the Black Widow movie?

Seriously, though, I wish they'd stick to the Cap 2 style approach of having one or two other Avengers guest-star in the title character's film, rather than try to mash everyone together and run through the obligatory "let's find something for everyone to do at the expense of everything else" sequences.