“I don’t think you have anything. You need to pretend this draft never happened.”

It takes major guts to say something that bold to anyone; it takes possible insanity to say that to Marvel Studios, the engine behind the most popular superhero franchises on the planet. And when Joss Whedon said that to Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige, he wasn’t yet the director of The Avengers, one of the most financially successful films of the last decade. Sure, Whedon had a devoted fan base and a string of beloved, niche television series, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. But his feature film directorial debut, the cult hit Serenity, was a box-office bomb. And yet, after giving the harsh truth about the Avengers draft by X-Men screenwriter Zak Penn, Whedon went home, wrote a five-page treatment of his Avengers vision, and was given approval to re-write the script as he saw fit. The rest, as you know, is franchise blockbuster history.

This rather frank detail from Whedon—from Amy Pascale’s new book, Joss Whedon: The Biography—isn’t entirely new. In 2012 he told GQ, “There just wasn't a script I was going to film a word of.” But this reminder of how strong of a stamp Whedon made on The Avengers stands in fascinating contrast to the recent Edgar Wright/Ant-Man controversy.

Wright’s abrupt departure led many to question whether or not Marvel had any room in its lucrative comic-book-adaptation universe for distinct, artistic vision. Addressing the Ant-Man question head-on this weekend, Kevin Feige told The Guardian:

The notion that Marvel was scared, the vision was too good, too far out for Marvel is not true. And I don’t want to talk too much about that because I think our movies speak to that. Go look at Iron Man 3; go look at The Winter Soldier; go see Guardians of the Galaxy later this month. It would have to be really out there to be too out there for us.

But Feige did concede that “Marvel movies are very collaborative, and I think they are more collaborative than what he [Wright] had been used to.” By “collaborative,” Feige means that the vision of the writers and directors behind any Marvel movie has to cohere with the larger look and feel of the franchise. It only makes sense that the bigger and more profitable the franchise gets, the more homogenized that vision becomes.

But how does that reconcile with the loose guidelines Whedon was given? According to the biography, the only stipulations for his Avengers script were that he include all the Avengers, Loki, a midway battle between the good guys, and finish with an epic showdown with the bad guys. If accurate, that’s a fairly loose leash. Is Whedon’s experience just from an earlier, more creativity-friendly time in the Marvel movie franchise? When the artistic vision of someone who didn’t have a single blockbuster film to their name was valued and encouraged? Or have the reports of Marvel’s controlling ways been overstated? I think it’s safe to say that the upcoming movie with the wisecracking raccoon and the monosyllabic tree will give us a better indication of just how much creativity we can expect from Marvel in the future.