We’re still in the dark on Joss Whedon’s next film. When we last heard about it, he said it made him weep uncontrollably:

“I wrote all the way through to the end of the movie and was crying, in public,” Whedon said. “The restaurant closed. The valet guy came to me and then just turned around and went the other way. And I don’t like to make a spectacle of myself, but I had to take off my shirt and blow my nose into it because they had taken away all the napkins. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t stop crying, and then I got in a car – luckily somebody else was driving – and kept crying for about 20 more minutes.”

Today at Comic-Con, Whedon had a panel in Hall H, and naturally the subject of his new film came up. While the project is still shrouded in mystery, he did tell the crowd [thanks to Haleigh Foutch for reporting]:

The film I’m working on right now, I could credit 100 different things for how it’s evolving. I’ll say this much about it: it’s historical fiction, it’s different than anything I’ve done before and for the first time I’m writing without a studio, a rating, a budget, or anything in mind. I’m writing purely on a level that I never have. When I finish the script, which should be a couple months, I believe all the studios will get together for a bidding-war/intervention because it is not — it’s very disturbing. It’s been a very exciting experience. I’m doing a ton of historical research, but I realized “Oh, this reminds me of Eli Roth’s Aftershock.” So, really don’t know where it’s going to go.

I haven’t seen Aftershock, so I can’t really weigh in on the comparison, but historical fiction definitely sounds like an interesting place for Whedon to go and a far cry from what he’s done before. I’m also always down for what Whedon presents as “disturbing”. He seems like a guy who feels like the world is failing and it’s his duty to find glimmers of hope among the wreckage. There’s definitely a lot he could work with if he’s in the historical fiction genre.

Later in the panel, he said:

Hopefully the next thing that I do, that I will talk to you about in a year’s time, will be a new version – a decidedly new version of the story that I keep trying to tell.

So how long can Whedon keep audiences waiting? As long as he likes. That’s the power you get when you make Avengers movies. But hopefully we’ll learn the specifics of his new project sooner rather than later.