Avengers: Doomsday directors Joe and Anthony Russo have defended their decision to film the upcoming Marvel blockbuster without a finished script, with further tweaks to the movie taking place on set during shooting.
While this isn’t the first MCU movie to evolve during production, Doomsday is undoubtedly one of Marvel’s most challenging projects to date, with a vast cast of characters to balance, sky-high expectation to meet, and a sense that the return of Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. is something of a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ moment after a series of middling previous movies.
Word that pieces of Doomsday’s intricate puzzle are being made up on the fly has naturally sparked concern among some fans, something that the Russos themselves have now sought to address.
“We always view the script as a living organism,” says Joe Russo said, as reported by the Associated Press. “We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors. We like to see what the actors bring to the characters, and sometimes you don’t get the actors until a few days or few weeks before you shoot them. And a lot of the time, that’s when the magic happens.”
With so many characters in the mix, there’s some sense to seeing which groups or pairings of actors end up having the most chemistry on set, and there’s no suggestion that the main plot beats of the movie aren’t locked down ahead of time. Here, the Russos seem to be talking more about specific lines of dialogue or character moments that may arise organically on set.
Still, with just over three months to go until Avengers: Doomsday releases, the Russos are still tinkering with the movie. It’s understood that further reshoots are now taking place with additional and returning cast members (Hawkeye actor Jeremy Renner has teased his involvement), tacked on to the production window that will soon begin for next year’s Avengers: Secret Wars.
How will it all turn out? We don’t have long until Doomsday itself on December 18 when the movie finally arrives in theaters.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
