The Avengers director Joss Whedon says his original cut of the film was 3 hours which he trimmed down to a 2 hours and 15 minutes. What got cut out?

  “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.”

  And again Whedon denies the appearance of two Marvel’s most infamous alien empires as Loki’s army.

  “I will say only this: It is not the Kree or the Skrulls… Those two aliens are Marvel mainstays and have enormous backstories. They have a big life of their own that just could not be contained in a film where I already had seven movie stars… The Skrulls — they can shape change. That’s a whole thing. I’ve already got Loki. He’s got magic. Once you got magic along with your Iron Man and your Black Widow — it’s a real juggling act.”

  For more of his interview here’s the Collider link.

  This Geek’s Opinion: No Kree. No Skrulls. Shiar are more X-Men territory. Maybe Loki has somehow given tech to the Frost Giants? Maybe the Badoon?