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Blog Avengers: Doomsday Shot Without a Finished Script — and the Russos Are Fine With That

Avengers: Doomsday Shot Without a Finished Script — and the Russos Are Fine With That

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Avengers: Doomsday Shot Without a Finished Script — and the Russos Are Fine With That

By Telepisodes Editor

The Russo brothers are defending their creative process for Marvel’s biggest 2026 release — and reigniting an industry debate in the process.

When Avengers: Doomsday started filming, the script still wasn’t finished. That’s the claim, anyway — and co-director Joe Russo is not rushing to apologize for it.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Russo framed the unfinished screenplay not as a crisis but as a working philosophy. “We always view the script as a living organism,” he said. The Russos — who shepherded Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame into cinematic history — describe themselves as “improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors.” They like to see what actors bring to their characters, and sometimes that doesn’t happen until a few days or weeks before shooting. “And a lot of the time, that’s when the magic happens,” Russo added.

The comments landed at a sensitive moment for Marvel Studios. The studio has a well-established reputation for starting production without locked screenplays — a practice that has drawn criticism from industry watchers and, increasingly, from former Marvel collaborators who have seen the consequences firsthand.

James Gunn’s Very Different Playbook

No one has articulated the counter-argument more directly than James Gunn. After taking over DC Studios with a mandate to reboot the DC Universe from the ground up, Gunn made a point of telling Rolling Stone last year that he would not follow Marvel’s script-early, fix-later model.

“I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies,” Gunn said. “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 noted that DC Studios had already “killed a project” because the screenplay simply wasn’t ready — a production that was greenlit and ready to roll, but that Gunn walked away from because the writing wasn’t there. “Everybody wanted to make the movie. It was greenlit, ready to go. The screenplay wasn’t good. And I couldn’t do a movie where the screenplay’s not good.”

The contrast is stark: Gunn’s guiding principle is that a movie shouldn’t be made unless the script is already good. The Russos’ guiding principle is that the script should keep evolving until the actors and the moment tell it to stop.

What the Russos Actually Do Differently

To be fair, the Russos’ approach isn’t sloppy — it’s specific. Their collaboration with Marvel has always been built around a particular creative intersection. “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,” Anthony Russo told the AP. “We intersect it in a very specific way. It’s that intersection which is where we can make sense of things.”

That “intersection” model is the key. The Russos aren’t trying to write the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe into a single cohesive document. They’re building a film that plugs into an existing framework — and the framework, in the case of Doomsday, is enormous. The film brings together a sprawling cast of characters, threatens consequences on a multiversal scale, and operates within a continuity that has been building for more than a decade across dozens of films and series.

There’s an argument that for a movie like Doomsday, a rigidly locked script at the start of principal photography could actually be a liability. When you’re coordinating that many moving parts — that many character arcs, that many franchise threads — the flexibility to adjust on the ground based on performances and practical production realities may be a genuine creative advantage. The Russos’ claim isn’t that they don’t care about the script. It’s that they trust the script to get there through a process that includes the actors, the rehearsal room, and whatever the shoot itself reveals.

The Acting Argument Has Merit

The part of Joe Russo’s defense that holds the most water is the one about actors. Blockbuster filmmaking frequently casts performers weeks or months before they step onto a set they may not fully understand yet. A script that leaves room for performance discoveries — for an actor to find a note in a scene that the writer didn’t hear on the page — can produce moments that a locked draft never would have contained.

The question, of course, is where the line sits between “creative flexibility” and “winging it on an 800-million-dollar production.” The Russos are betting that the difference is a matter of process discipline and directorial confidence. Others in the industry are betting the opposite.

Why This Debate Matters Beyond One Movie

This isn’t really a Doomsday debate. It’s a process debate, and it’s echoed across the industry. When a major director publicly defends shooting before the script is finished, while another major director publicly kills a project for exactly that reason, audiences and industry observers are getting a live look at two fundamentally different theories of how a movie gets made.

Marvel’s approach has delivered some of the highest-grossing films in history. It has also, depending on who you ask, produced entries in its later phases that felt overstuffed, undercooked, or both. DC’s reset-under-Gunn is still in its early chapters — the proof will be in the films that come out of it. The Russos’ Doomsday is one data point in a much larger argument about what audiences actually pay for when they buy a ticket to a blockbuster.

What to Watch For

Avengers: Doomsday is scheduled for December 2026. The script question won’t be settled until the film reaches screens and audiences decide whether the Russos’ “living organism” produced something alive or something that got away from its writers. Until then, the debate is academic — and fascinating.

For Marvel fans tracking the studio’s creative direction, the Russo brothers’ comments are a useful reminder that the machine behind these films is run by people who genuinely disagree about how to make them. That disagreement isn’t a flaw in the system. It’s the system working exactly as designed — two strong directorial voices colliding with an enormous canvas and trying to make something that holds together on opening weekend.

And if there’s a lesson in the contrast between Gunn’s hard line and the Russos’ flexible one, it’s this: there is no single correct answer to the question of when a screenplay is ready. There are only different bets, made by different filmmakers, on different movies, with different casts and different tolerances for risk. The Russos are making theirs.

Avengers: Doomsday is slated for December 16, 2026. Follow our coverage for more on Marvel’s biggest 2026 release and the creative forces driving it.