Directors Joe and Anthony Russo confirmed this week that production on “Avengers: Doomsday” began without a finished screenplay, telling the Associated Press they treat scripts as flexible documents that evolve alongside the actors and material discovered during rehearsals. Joe Russo described their process as rooted in improvisation, noting that the pair often does not lock in cast members until days or weeks before shooting begins, a gap he said frequently produces some of the film’s strongest moments.
The unfinished script reflects a chaotic development period for the project. Marvel originally planned its next “Avengers” film as “The Kang Dynasty,” built around Jonathan Majors as the franchise’s next central villain. That plan collapsed after Majors was convicted on a domestic assault charge and dropped from the studio’s future plans, forcing Marvel to rebuild the project from the ground up as “Doomsday” and bring back the Russos, who had not intended to return after directing “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame.”
Star Sebastian Stan, who worked on the production, described the process bluntly, saying the cast filmed scattered scenes without a script and adapted to a shoot that kept evolving day to day. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has characterized the ongoing rewrites as part of the studio’s standard creative process, referring to daily script adjustments as routine “plus-ing” rather than a sign of disorganization.
The approach has drawn scrutiny given the scale of the production, which reunites Robert Downey Jr., now playing Doctor Doom instead of Tony Stark, with Chris Evans returning as Captain America, alongside a cast spanning the Avengers’ core timeline, the Fantastic Four’s universe and the X-Men characters from Fox’s earlier films.
Rival studio DC has taken the opposite stance publicly, with DC Studios co-head James Gunn stating he will not greenlight a shoot without a locked screenplay, a policy widely read as an implicit critique of Marvel’s methods. Critics of the unfinished-script approach argue that productions this expensive and logistically complex benefit from a stable blueprint before cameras roll, since coordinating actors, sets, visual effects and stunt teams becomes harder when the story itself remains in flux.
“Avengers: Doomsday” is scheduled to open in theaters December 18.
