MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios

by JoAnna Robinson

That snub was particularly painful because Penn had known Whedon for a long time; they were both Wesleyan graduates. Thinking that maybe the situation was uncomfortable for Whedon, too, Penn called him up. “He said to me, ‘No, it’s not awkward for me. I’m rewriting you,’ ” Penn recalled. “It became pretty apparent that he had less than zero interest in, in any way, having me involved with the movie.” 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?” Penn didn’t appreciate being booted off a Marvel movie yet again, although in this case, at least it was by an acclaimed writer, not the lead actor. “I think he’s a dick. I think he’s a bad person, and it was really surprising,” Penn said of Whedon. “Remember, my bonus is based on my credit. So literally millions and millions of dollars, which is not the issue here, but that just came out of my pocket and went into Joss’s pocket.”