Some story hints emerge from the man tasked with bringing The Avengers together, Mr Joss Whedon…
He's still got some time before he has to roll cameras on the film, ahead of its release in 2012, but director Joss Whedon has been talking about one or two of his plans for the movie. These fresh quotes came from an interview that he's done in Australia's Sunday Herald-Sun.
Firstly, he's revealed that, in spite of The Avengers being a male-heavy clutch of superheroes, there will be more female characters on board than just Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow. Whedon told the newspaper, "It is true that the movie is only going to have one female avenger, but she will not be the only female character."
That, in itself ,is no earth-shattering revelation, that there are going to be more women in a film. But given Whedon's pedigree with writing and directing female characters, we can but hope that the rumour circulating that one of the villain roles will be female comes true. Alice Eve's name, given that she's left X-Men: First Class, is one that's been mentioned (although she's being linked with lots of roles at the moment, we've noticed).
Whedon did get on to talk about the movie's story too. He revealed that "It will be a new story that has many things from different arcs of the comics in it. There is no one Avengers story that you can just do the way that you can do the origin of Spider-Man. You really have to cull from the original and The Ultimates, which is one of The Avengers titles."
And for now, that's all we're getting. We'll pass on more as we get it.
In the meantime, we can't find the piece on the Sunday Herald-Sun website, but do go over and say hello to the good folks there.