No, it doesn’t seem to be the super exact down-to-the-second running time yet, but at least we know we won’t be in for a 90 minute mini adventure or a three hour monster.

Coming from a recent interview with Collider (via CBM), Joss Whedon has a few words on editing down his precious Avengers and how it has changed the film. What is the magic running time? 2 hours and fifteen minutes!

From Collider:

“My first cut was three hours long and it’s now down to 2 hours and 15 minutes, and I’m extremely proud of that. I had always intended to go over two, under two and a half. There was no way a movie with this many great actors and this much epic scope was gonna clock in under two and not feel a little anemic, somebody wasn’t gonna get their moment if that happened. But at the same time, I get very angry that romantic comedies run over two hours long, it’s like ‘Guys, that’s not okay.’ More isn’t more. I don’t want anything in the movie that shouldn’t be.”

“There’s a lot of me that got cut out, but I think part of the process in a situation like this is you make the movie, you make your movie, then you remove yourself out of the equation. At some point you stop looking beyond The Avengers movie at your own stuff, you don’t look at that horizon you look at this movie and you go, ‘You know what, The Avengers are more important than I am so these things that I’m obsessed with aren’t necessarily moving the story forward, and therefore they are baggage.’ You can do that in a TV show, you can bring your baggage and sort of lay it out because you have a season to do it, but in a movie you actually have to remove yourself from the equation a bit and when I was finally able to do that, I saw a much clearer road to how to get the best experience for the audience.”.

What do you think he means by “removing himself from the equation”? Will this film be without that trademark Whedon self-awareness? Will The Avengers be better now that Joss has trimmed the fat?