Joss Whedon's making the interview rounds again this week as promotional efforts for Avengers: Age of Ultron ramp up ahead of the film's May release, and one interview in particular got a lot of attention. Speaking to Digital Spy while still shooting Age of Ultron last summer, Whedon came down hard on studios' refusal to make female-driven comic-book movies, railing against "stupid people" and "intractable sexism" in the industry. In the time since he made those statements, some notable leaps for women in genre cinema have been made, including the announcement of films featuring Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel and the box-office successes of Lucy and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, so BuzzFeed reached out to Whedon to see if his feelings have changed at all since last summer.

“I just thought, 'I sounded very harsh',” he said. “And then [Marvel announced], ‘We’re going to make Captain Marvel. We’re going to make Black Panther. We’re going to shake it up.’ I was just like, great! Now I just sound mean and bitter. But, you know, there’s a lot to be mean and bitter about.”

Whedon also came back around to concerns he has about returning to helm the massive two-part Avengers: Infinity War project Marvel announced earlier this year. He's already said he likely won't do it, citing both how hard making Age of Ultron was and his desire to go and create something that belongs to him, which was a concern he also had before returning to make Age of Ultron. In the BuzzFeed interview, he elaborated on something he'd been thinking of making at the time he agreed to return to Marvel, and after hearing about it, we kinda hope he still does.

"I will say that when I was thinking about, 'Well, if I wasn’t going to do Avengers 2, what would I want to do?' — of course the first thing I thought of was 'turn-of-the-century female Batman.' Not Batman actually. But, you know, something cool. One person. Can’t stress that enough. Movie about one person — not a team, not 10, just one. But [I would] do a nice sort of hard action movie that combined all my favorite things. Something that would be the love child of Sam Fuller and Edward Gorey. You know, I’ve had many thoughts since then. Oh, I could do this! Oh, I could do that! But it is my instinct to want to tell those stories."

Whedon has in many ways built his career on tales of kickass women, and it seems he's thinking of returning to that in a new way. Whether he still wants to develop this particular idea is unclear, but if this is the kind of stuff he wants to dabble in instead of Marvel movies for a while, we're into it. What do you think? Would you want to see Whedon's female "Batman" idea come to fruition?

(Via BuzzFeed)