The Avengers: Doomsday hype train is chugging along, and the next stop is Avengers Endgame: Encore, which hits theaters September 25 to further thrill fans who gobbled up the re-release’s record-setting trailer. There may be a few minutes of new footage included therein, but 99% of the movie is going to be the same thing you watched back in 2019. However, when it comes to Doomsday, directors Joe and Anthony Russo would like you to know it won’t be the same old, same old.
If it had been, they say, they wouldn’t have signed on for their surprise return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In a new interview with the AP, Anthony Russo says their interest was piqued by Stephen McFeely, who, along with co-writer Christopher Markus, has penned multiple MCU entries, including Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. McFeely offered up a “foundational narrative concept” that excited the directing team.
“We never want to coast on the capital that already exists,” Anthony Russo told the AP. “We want the greatest value of the film to reside in the new thing it’s bringing to the table.”
That’s a wild thing to say considering Marvel has made a tradition out of building on what’s come before, with Endgame presumably doing so much table-setting for Doomsday that it necessitated a re-release. And based on all the characters who are crammed into Doomsday—veteran heroes, returning villains, familiar faces playing new villains, and fresh additions to the team like the Fantastic Four and the X-Men—it seems like audiences will need to have a grasp of “the capital that already exists,” lest they feel completely lost within the first five minutes.
The Russos also talked about what it was like starting production on Doomsday without a finished script in hand. It sounds like… they weren’t worried one bit about potential chaos.
“We always view the script as a living organism,” Joe explained. “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.”
The interview also contains the intriguing tidbit that Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West was one of the touchstones for Doomsday, thanks to it being a movie with both “grand scale and moments of emotional intimacy.”
We’ll be listening for that harmonica when Avengers: Doomsday arrives December 18.
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