The Russo Brothers Shot Avengers: Doomsday Without a Finished Script — and They Have a Point

The Russo Brothers Shot Avengers: Doomsday Without a Finished Script — and They Have a Point

Here’s a sentence that should make any Hollywood screenwriter wake up in a cold sweat: the Russo brothers started shooting Avengers: Doomsday without a finished script. And according to Joe Russo, that was entirely by design.

Speaking to the Associated Press, the Avengers: Endgame co-director described the screenplay not as a fixed blueprint but as a “living organism” — one that evolves as actors step onto the set, as scenes find their rhythm in rehearsal, and as the story reveals itself in the messy reality of production. “We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors,” Russo said. “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.”

It’s a bold stance in an industry where the phrase “finish the script before you shoot” is usually treated as a basic professional standard. And it lands right in the middle of an ongoing debate about what’s happening to the way big-budget films get made.

The Marvel Way vs. The Gunn Standard

The Russo brothers’ own Infinity War and Endgame — the highest-grossing film in cinema history — were famously reshaped as the story developed. Now, with Doomsday, they’re doubling down on the same philosophy for a film that’s already carrying enough hype to fill stadiums.

But the approach is not universal. When James Gunn took over DC Studios, he drew a hard line: no production without a finished screenplay. “I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies,” Gunn told Rolling Stone last year. “It’s not because of home screens getting so good. The number-one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay.”

Gunn was direct about what happened at DC when the script wasn’t ready: they killed a project. A greenlit, ready-to-shoot film got scrapped because the screenplay “wasn’t good.” For the Russo camp, that kind of rigidity looks like a luxury they can’t afford — or don’t want. For Gunn, it looks like the only way to stop making movies that audiences can feel were assembled without a plan.

Two directors. Two philosophies. Both operating at the highest level of blockbuster filmmaking. And both convinced the other is wrong.

Doctor Doom, Multiverse, and a Late Casting Pivot

The context matters here. Avengers: Doomsday isn’t just any Marvel movie. It’s the fifth Avengers film — the one that was originally going to be Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, built around Jonathan Majors as the next Thanos-sized threat. When Majors was written out of the MCU amid legal troubles, the entire project had to be reimagined from the ground up.

That’s the kind of upheaval that makes a “living organism” approach look less like a creative indulgence and more like a survival strategy. You don’t have the luxury of a locked script when the central villain gets swapped out months before principal photography. You adapt.

Robert Downey Jr. returning as Doctor Doom — a villainous turn for the actor who defined Iron Man — was one of the biggest casting surprises in recent MCU history. The film also stars Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Pedro Pascal, Paul Rudd, Anthony Mackie, Florence Pugh, and Vanessa Kirby, pulling together heroes from multiple Marvel universes for what the studio is billing as a collision course between “three distinct universes” facing “an existential threat unlike anything they’ve ever encountered.”

It opens December 15, 2026. That’s close enough that the production choices being made right now will shape what audiences see in theaters in a matter of months — and if you’re still thinking about the emotional gut-punch of Avengers: Endgame, this one is building on that exact legacy.

Anthony Russo: “Our Job Isn’t to Answer for the Entirety of the MCU”

Anthony Russo offered the most concise defense of the brothers’ role inside the MCU machine. “The thing that Joe and I have always appreciated about our collaboration with Marvel is: Our job isn’t to answer for the entirety of the MCU,” he told the AP. “We intersect it in a very specific way. It’s that intersection which is where we can make sense of things.”

The Russos aren’t claiming to run the entire Marvel universe. They’re saying their job is to make a film — one movie, one story, one set of characters — that works on its own terms, even if the broader connective tissue keeps shifting underneath them. The door they walked through for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness showed how unstable that tissue can get, and Doomsday is heading into the same tangle.

It’s a reasonable position. The MCU’s sprawling, interconnected model has always asked individual films to serve a larger plan, and that plan changes constantly. Directors who insist on total creative control often don’t get hired. Directors who accept that their movie is one piece of a moving puzzle tend to stay in the room.

Whether audiences will be able to tell the difference in December — whether “living organism” produces the kind of narrative coherence that made Endgame feel inevitable rather than improvised — is the real question.

What the Debate Says About Blockbuster Filmmaking Right Now

This isn’t just a Marvel story. The Russos-versus-Gunn contrast is really about whether the blockbuster model is fundamentally broken at the script level. Gunn’s argument — that unfinished screenplays are killing the movie business — is a thesis about pipeline, not personality. It says audiences feel the difference when a film was built on a solid foundation versus one that was figured out week by week on set.

The counter-argument, the one the Russos are living out on Doomsday, is that rigid scripting can strangle the spontaneity that makes a performance worth watching. Some of the best scenes in the MCU came from adjustments made in the moment — an actor’s read, a line tweak, a staging choice that no one predicted on paper. The Russos built their reputation on finding those moments. The question is whether a film as complex as Doomsday — three universes, a digital-first villain, an ensemble of this size — can be shaped the same way and still hold together when the lights go down in a theater.

Gunn’s DC experiment will offer a live test of the opposite approach. His first DC film, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, was built on a finished script and a clear emotional through-line — and it showed. If his DC films land with audiences and critics using that same discipline, the “living organism” defense starts to look more like nostalgia for a workflow that had its day. If his films feel over-prepared and somehow lifeless, the Russos’ improvisation-first instincts get a fresh endorsement.

For now, only one of those models is heading toward a December release with Avengers: Doomsday on the marquee. December 15 is the date. The script may still be evolving. And depending on who you ask, that’s either the recipe for something remarkably alive — or something held together with tape and hope. The same debate has followed Spider-Man‘s biggest blockbusters and Endgame‘s final act — and in both cases, audiences showed up either way.

Why This Matters for Movie Fans

The Russo brothers have earned the right to their process. They took the MCU’s most difficult challenge — closing out an era — and made it feel like an event that meant something beyond the box office. If they want to keep shaping the script on the fly for Doomsday, that’s their call, and the cast and crew they’re working with clearly trust them.

But moviegoers have also spent the last few years watching blockbuster films that felt overstuffed, under-edited, or narratively adrift. The difference between a movie that surprises you in a good way and one that feels like it was made up as it went along isn’t always visible from the outside. It shows up in the final cut.

The real test of the “living organism” philosophy isn’t whether it works on a soundstage or in a writer’s room. It’s whether audiences walk out of Avengers: Doomsday feeling like the story earned its ending — or like it was still finding itself when the credits rolled.

December 15. Keep an eye on it.