ROUNDUP: Age Of Ultron updates

As all the Age of Ultron details go floating around, we’ve grabbed as many as we could in one easy, bite-sized lump…

Speaking to USA Today, Mark Ruffalo said Joss Whedon is totally on top of his game: “Joss is in his full height of his powers. This movie is much more sprawling and epic than the first one. They’re really in an existential, dire crisis. It has a darker quality. The Avengers are really struggling with their own shortcomings and the dissolution of S.H.I.E.L.D. and where they go and who they are in the world. There’s a lot of negativity towards them.”

On the character of Bruce Banner, he said that time is getting the better of him: “I think they set it up nicely now that Banner’s turning 46 years old, and there comes a point where it’s like ‘how much more running can I do for myself?'” He was then asked how getting older changes Banner. “Whatever you hate about yourself or you don’t like, when you get to be 46 years old, you start to say ‘okay, no.’

“Obviously, you can never really get away from yourself, so you start to live with some of the things you think are so bad. And maybe they’re not that bad. Maybe those things are what you need to do whatever you were never able to accomplish. I think that’s the ticket forward for Banner, to start to figure out where we go with him, keep that story interesting.”

He adds that there’s a more interesting dynamic between him and his alter-ego too: “Hulk is as afraid of Banner as Banner is afraid of Hulk. It’s in the comics. But because you haven’t really been able to get inside of Hulk’s head, because the [cinematic] technology wasn’t available to make it nuanced enough to do that, and now it is. So now I think there’s a way to do it. Both of these guys are obviously the same guy, and they have got to come to peace somehow with each other. And I think that this confrontation is buildingalong the lines of this film.”

In related news, Agent Carter herself, Haley Atwell has confirmed she is in Ultron: “We [her and Joss] went out drinking one night and he was like, ‘You know, it would be great to write something for you. And I was like, ‘Yes, Joss, it would! It would be amazing!'”

We can assume that going by the pics that popped up a couple of months ago (here), we’ll be seeing a younger Peggy and not the older version from Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige chatted to IGN about Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Quicksilver and how he’s nothing like the superb Evan Peters take on the character in X-Men: Days of Future Past: “They may as well be two completely different characters. We are very much playing up two things that [X-Men didn’t] play with: one is his relationship with his twin sister, Wanda. The other is, his backstory as an Eastern European child of a war-torn country, and we follow him throughout the whole movie — him and Wanda — as it relates to their feelings about the Avengers and how that shifts and changes over the course of the movie. So it’s a very different thing than coming out from one, unbelievably awesome showcase sequence of the movie, and much more interwoven throughout the entire movie.”

So there you go… now, move on… you’ve a while to wait yet.

Written and directed by Joss Whedon, Avengers: Age of Ultron stars Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Jeremy Renner, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, Thomas Kretschmann, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen and James Spader.

The Age of Ultron begins on May 1st, 2015.