There’s no other way to put it. Thor, already one of the more inscrutable Avengers, decides he’d much rather be introspective on his own and jets off to a secret Asgardian cave, where he dips into a wading pool and has visions of Infinity Stones, the various multi-colored deus ex machinae that have been MacGuffins in so many Marvel movies thus far. Satisfied, he returns to the team with helpful expositional info on the stones, which are guaranteed to play a much bigger role in the third Avengers film, already earmarked for two-part release in 2018 and 2019.

Marvel Studios

It's a baffling diversion, and to hear Whedon tell it, Marvel insisted on its inclusion as part of an "unpleasant" creative battle. Speaking on the Empire Film Podcast, he said “With the cave, it really turned into: They pointed a gun to the farm’s head. They said, ‘Give us the cave or we’ll take out the farm.’” After making both Avengers movies for Marvel, Whedon is calling it quits, handing the keys over to the talented Russo Brothers for the third installment, and that's enough reason for him to finally discuss the negative side of working on a project as vast as this one.

For all of Whedon's storytelling skills (and vast capital with the "nerd community," accumulated from his TV projects Buffy, Angel, Firefly, and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog), he was never the creative point man for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That honor goes to Kevin Feige, the producer of every film since the first installment (2008's Iron Man), who sold the comic-book company on the prospect of making a grand, interconnected series of films that aped the storytelling style it had used for generations. Each individual hero—Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk—could have his own series of films, like an individual monthly comic-book title—and then they would all be united for an Avengers movie, which would function as a grand, unifying event.

Marvel Comics has obeyed this creative process for generations. In 1984, editor in chief Jim Shooter devised Secret Wars, a limited series that would see all of the company's heroes united in a grand battle royale by an omnipotent alien being. Shakespeare, this was not—Secret Wars was tied into a line of action figures sold by Mattel and was quickly followed by an equally preposterous sequel. Shooter was Marvel's editor in chief for nine years and was notorious for the strict creative control he placed on all of its titles, and the frequent clashes he had with writers, many of whom would quit and move to rival company DC after a few years, citing creative burnout.

By all accounts, Feige is no Jim Shooter—even when Whedon gripes about creative clashes with Marvel in the Empire interview, he refers to its production team as "artists" and cites his respect for their process in keeping the grand enterprise knitted together. But Age of Ultron isn’t the first time Marvel has clashed with its creative staff. After working with the director Edgar Wright for years on an Ant-Man project (Wright was hired because he had a personal take on one of the company's more idiosyncratic heroes), Wright left the project a year ago citing "differences in vision." Given that Ant-Man was Wright's baby, one would figure that his departure would stall the project, but Marvel quickly found another director (Peyton Reed) to usher it to the screen, and the resulting product (due out in July) looks dashed-off, to say the least.