The unstoppable rise of social media has also given birth to the cancel culture phenomenon, and we’re now at a stage where it’s guilty until proven innocent, such is the rapid rate at which opinion and information spreads across the internet. That’s not to say that Joss Whedon is squeaky clean, mind you, with numerous former collaborators having come forward with revelations about the unhealthy working environments he cultivated on his sets, but in the technological age, his silence only incriminates him further.
Dating right back to the first time Ray Fisher called him out for his abusive and gross behavior during the Justice League reshoots, Whedon has never commented or even publicly acknowledged the accusations. In fact, the only time we’ve heard a peep out of the former cult favorite is when he announced he was stepping down as the showrunner of HBO’s upcoming series The Nevers, which was long before several members of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast came forward.
Things aren’t looking good for Whedon’s immediate prospects in mainstream Hollywood, then, and we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us War Machine was getting his own Disney Plus show long before Armor Wars was announced – that Marvel Studios were considering bringing him back into the fold for the X-Men reboot before all of the recent controversy came to light.
Whedon initially walked away from the MCU because he fell out of love with the franchise, although his success rate in helming ensemble-based comic book adaptations is spotty to say the least. The Avengers is great after a shaky first act, but Age of Ultron is easily the weakest of the team’s four outings, and the less said about the theatrical edition of Justice League the better. Whedon was hardly a stranger to the characters, though, having performed uncredited rewrites on Bryan Singer’s original movie and working on Marvel Comics’ Astonishing X-Men, but clearly he won’t be handling the reboot now and it looks like he could be finding work hard to come by for the foreseeable future given that he’s reportedly been blacklisted in Hollywood.