Marvel producer Jeremy Latcham says the Avengers movies could go on indefinitely, telling Yahoo Movies: “We could stay here forever. It’s fun. Why would you leave?”

Latcham may not be as big a name to Marvel fans as Kevin Feige, but he’s just as important. The filmmaker holds the lofty title of Senior Vice-President of Production Development and he’s played an instrumental part in ushering in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starting back in 2008 with Iron Man. He’s since had a hand in all of the studio’s output, most recently as executive producer on Avengers: Age of Ultron, which is where we caught up with him last year on the film’s set in Shepperton, London.

Latcham says they’ve mapped out their release plan up to 2020, but doesn’t see any sign that they’ll ever stop. Here’s what else the super-producer told us about Avengers: Age of Ultron and the future of the Marvel movies.

What does Age of Ultron bring new to the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

I think the biggest new element in the film is Ultron. What’s exciting to me about Ultron is the genesis of thing that comes out of The Avengers. He doesn’t show up as an external threat — he’s something that comes from inside, from the darkness living within us. It’s kind of fun to see that manifest itself into being something that they have to face off with. He can just manifest in a lot of different places and cause a lot of havoc and danger. Just one consciousness is enough to spread and cause a wreck everywhere.

What else is new?

The Avengers are now left without a superstructure [S.H.I.E.L.D.] to press down on them, and now the kids have to make up the rules and figure out what time to go to bed, what they should have for dinner… they’re not living inside this big S.H.I.E.L.D. superstructure anymore, so Tony is bankrolling everything. He’s the money behind the operation — clearly because he’s got plenty of it — but he doesn’t want to be the operational lead of it, because that’s not what he does. So Captain America, Steve Rogers, is very much in charge, and there’s a really cool dynamic between them now as they’re sussing out the whole thing, putting this roster together.

How do Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch fit into the story? Friends or foes?

They will evolve over the course of the story. As we saw at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in that tag scene with Baron Von Strucker, they have come out of a dark place. We’ll learn the reasoning for that over the course of the movie. We’ll learn where that comes from, what their backstory is, and as with all things, their backstory is really connected to the bigger story and the Avengers.

We forget often that Tony Stark has a past. He’s been a hero, he’s been on top of the world for so long, but right before that happened, he was off selling bombs to the highest bidder, regardless of where they came from. It’s a past that he’s gotten away from, that I think he’s kind of forgotten about. But if you were someone who grew up in a war-torn region — in Eastern Europe somewhere — and your life was affected by something that Tony Stark did, you probably didn’t forget, despite the fact that he’s Iron Man now. In fact, that probably made you harbor resentment for years towards him, because of what he did. So I think there’s a cool dynamic there to be explored.

How is Joss Whedon upping the ante this time around?



With this film, we’ve said we want to capture that big epic, sprawling, see-the-world kinda vibe. Which means going to much bigger locations. We shot in South Africa. We shot in South Korea. We shot in Italy. We’re building a massive exterior set here in London that’s also going to be playing as part of Eastern Europe.

So hopefully it’s going to be a real opportunity to travel the world and see a lot more. When we sit around talking about it, we say: How is that the Bond films can go to all these different places? How can they show such great scenery? How can they be in so many cool locations? And we wanted to tap into a little bit of that. It’s fun to go to these other big locations. We shot a sequence in Johannesburg, a big fight scene, right in the middle of downtown Johannesburg, and you feel it when you watch the dailies. You can see it wasn’t on a back lot, that wasn’t on a soundstage, the extras are better and it all feels more real.