The term 'reshoot' used to be looked at with much derision by people outside the filmmaking community, but many now realize that it is actually a rather standard part of the process. Director Joss Whedon has recently announced that principal photography on Avengers: Age of Ultron has culminated, and now, producer Kevin Feige has suggests that the cast could end up reassembling for two weeks of reshoots, or additional photography, for the film.
Talking about how he remains optimistic about the process of reshoots, Feige said that
"I'm reading the part in Jedi where George (Lucas) is finding the movie in the cut. It happened in Empire, and it happened in Star Wars. You've heard about those famous early screenings where people were like, 'Poor George. His career is over.' That brings great solace to me when we screen our movies for the first time and they're terrible and they're a big mess. I remind myself to get calm and proceed. Post is my favorite part, because it's easiest to find what's wrong with the movie when you're watching the movie."
Feige also confirmed that it has become standard practice for Marvel Studios productions to schedule two weeks of reshoots so that there are no issues with scheduling. This practice helps make post-production more manageable in case of potential issues, and has been used to great effect in the studio's previous efforts. He explained this by saying that
"We always build in two weeks because the hardest thing about the additional photography is the actors' schedules, wrangling the actors. So we just build it in. We've done some movies that have three days of reshoots, some that have fifteen days, twenty days if not more.
Sometimes we know what we need by that point and sometimes we're wrangling them anyway. There's a shot in Thor: The Dark World we call the Three Continent shot. It's one shot, with three different actors in it, that was done on three different continents.
Additional photography is invaluable. Sometimes it's to fix something that's not working, but most of the time on our movies it's two-fold: sometimes a better or more exciting idea will come along, or more often something will come out of the movie - because it's too long or the movie is stronger without a particular beat or scene or shot, and you need connective tissue."
Avengers: Age of Ultron is scheduled for release on May 1st, 2015.