Could Joss Whedon kill an Avengers member?

Joss Whedon has always had a penchant for killing major characters. If you haven’t seen some of his best TV work, and don’t want to be spoiled to his television shows that are almost a decade old now, you might want to quite reading this right now.

Joss WhedonOn Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon killed Angel and Buffy both, although both made miraculous returns. He also killed Willow’s lover Tara (which sent Willow on a murderous rampage), Buffy’s own mother Joyce and Xander’s fiancée Anya, plus characters like Jonathan and Jenny Calendar. To add to the pain, he even killed Giles in the comics that continues the story.

On Angel, which I still rank as the best Joss Whedon show of all time, he killed Fred, Wesley, Cordelia, hinted that Gunn was dying, and don’t forget, he started the series off with the death of one of the show’s first major characters – Doyle. Hell, the only two people that lived from the first episode to the finale was Angel and his main nemesis Lindsey – who died in the finale as well.

Joss WhedonIn the Firefly movie sequel Serenity, Joss killed both Wash and Shepherd. And, don’t forget, he killed Agent Coulson in The Avengers, although he is somehow returning as well in TV’s Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD.

So, with characters as beloved and iconic as those in The Avengers, could Joss Whedon kill someone even more important that Agent Coulson?

“I’m always joking about that. Um…maybe?” Whedon said. “But I’d have to have a really good reason, a really great sequence for [Marvel execs] to go, ‘We’ll cut off a potential franchise, that’s fine!’ They know as any good studio does, that without some stakes, some real danger, how involved can we get? We don’t just rule it out across the board, but neither is the mission statement ‘Who can we kill?’ We try to build the story organically and go, ‘How hard can we make it on these people?’ You go to the movies to see people you love suffer-that’s why you go to the movies.”

So, we’ll take that as a strong “probably not.” What would you think if Joss Whedon killed a major Marvel character in Avengers 2?

Source: Entertainment Weekly