‘Avengers Doomsday’ Was Shot Without a Finished Script

Avengers: Doomsday didn’t have a finished script when it went into production — but one of the movie’s directors doesn’t see that as a bad thing.

That would be Joe Russo, who told the Associated Press how he and brother Anthony “always view the script as a living organism” as part of the outlet’s fall movie preview.

Russo added:

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.

He better hope so; Marvel bet one of their biggest budgets ever on Doomsday at a time when their box-office track record has been spotty. Their Spider-Man: Brand New Day is one of the company’s biggest hits ever, but several other recent releases, including Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts*, drastically underperformed expectations. And those were the films, along with The Fantastic Four: First Steps, that were advertised as the key lead-ins to Doomsday.

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Needing a living organism of a screenplay may have been a necessity in the case of Doomsday, which was originally announced as Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, and was expected to focus on the time-travelling villain until Jonathan Majors was fired from the film after he was convicted of assault in 2023.

The original director (Brand New Day’s Destin Daniel Cretton) dropped out of The Kang Dynasty, replaced by the Russos, and Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom replaced Majors as the film’s villain. That’s a hefty number of changes for a massive tentpole.

Russo also told the Associated Press that their vision for the film was to make an homage to the films of spaghetti western auteur Sergio Leone.

“Joe and I grew up fans of all types of cinema, but Westerns have always been very special to us,” said Anthony Russo. “Throughout cinema history, the Western has been declared dead for decades, and then you can still make one of the greatest examples of the genre.”

Avengers: Doomsday is scheduled for release in theaters on December 18, 2026. The Russos also directed its upcoming sequel, Avengers: Secret Wars, which is coming in 2027.