One of the main issues Joss Whedon has encountered in his career is the level of control he has over his projects.  My paper will explore the conflicts between Whedon and various other contributors to the films and television series he has worked on, including directors, studios, and television channels, and how they affected both the finished product and Whedon’s perception of it.  One of the earliest examples of such a conflict in Whedon’s career was with the movie of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.   Whedon was unhappy over several issues, most famously actor Donald Sutherland’s rewriting of his lines.  Similarly, Whedon was unsatisfied with the film Alien: Resurrection, for which he wrote the script but had to rewrite it five times based on 20^th Century Fox’s demands.  He also felt that the movie was terribly miscast and that director Jean-Pierre Jeunet changed the intended delivery of many of the lines.

Later in his career, Whedon was involved in two well-known feuds with the Fox television channel over his shows Firefly and Dollhouse.  Both shows were cancelled after relatively short runs.  They both had low ratings, but this was partially due to being shown on Friday nights, a decision which was made because of Fox’s discomfort with the subject matter of both shows.  More recently, Whedon had to fight with Marvel Studios over Avengers: Age of Ultron in order to keep scenes like the farmhouse and the dream sequences in the film, and he ended up having to compromise with the studio by putting in other scenes that he felt did not fit into the film.  Whedon is not the only screenwriter or director to fight with a studio or another artist, and I might discuss some other notable examples not involving Whedon.  I am still working on finding sources to use as references.