Penn said that he balked when Whedon told him to take his name off the screenplay that he had spent years developing: “My kids have grown up while I’ve been working on it. They’ve all told their friends about it. What’s going to happen when their friends are like, ‘Your dad didn’t work on Avengers’?” Whedon’s response, according to Penn: “What’s going to happen when my kids think that you wrote half the story?”
