Avengers: Doomsday Was Shot Without a Finished Script — And Why the Russos Might Be Right

The Script Question That Won’t Go Away

Christopher Nolan told Empire magazine last year that audiences don’t need a finished screenplay to make a great film. He said it again in interviews around Oppenheimer, and he’s said variations of it for a decade. The Russos are now the ones saying it out loud — just with a Marvel-sized spotlight on them.

Avengers: Doomsday began filming earlier this year. The script was not finished. By Hollywood standards, that’s not unusual for a Marvel production. By the standards of a $250 million+ ensemble blockbuster carrying the entire MCU’s hopes for its next phase, it’s a question that deserves an honest answer.

Joe Russo gave the most direct response yet to Variety: the screenplay is a “living organism.”

That’s a pretty phrase. It’s also, in this case, a defensible one. But the reason it’s defensible has almost nothing to do with scripts and everything to do with who is holding the pen — and who is standing behind the camera.

What “Living Organism” Actually Means Here

When a director calls a screenplay a living organism, they usually mean one of two things. The honest version: we’re going to figure out the second half when we get there, because we trust ourselves to land it. The PR version: our process is so fluid and collaborative that “finished” would actually restrict us.

The Russos have spent the last two years defining exactly where Doomsday sits inside a sprawling fictional universe that has been accumulating moving parts since 2008. Downey Jr. coming back as Doctor Doom is not just a casting story — it’s a narrative junction. A villain whose comic-book power set includes reality manipulation, magic, and multi-universal travel is, in Disney’s hands, the connective tissue between X-Men, Fantastic Four, and the Avengers proper. That’s not a character you write in a vacuum and hand to a director. That’s a character you build jointly, across departments, while the world is watching.

The script being a living organism may simply mean: the Russos are figuring out the character alongside Marvel Studios, and yes, there were days on set where the page wasn’t locked. That’s not a defense of sloppy planning. It’s a description of a specific kind of collaborative filmmaking.

The Nolan Parallel That Nobody’s Drawing

Nolan’s argument about scripts and home screens was a deflection — he was asked about audiences splitting their attention, and he gave an answer about filmmaking process. But his broader point, repeated across multiple interviews, is that great films are made in the edit bay and on the floor, not locked away in a final draft three months before shooting.

The Russos are not Nolan. Their sensibility — improvisational, rehearsal-based, actor-first — is closer to the Coen brothers’ early work or the best days of Judd Apatow than to Nolan’s architect-brain precision. But the underlying claim is the same: the script is a starting point, and the real filmmaking happens when the camera rolls.

This is where the Doomsday conversation gets interesting, because the Russos have a track record that actually supports the claim. Avengers: Endgame — the direct predecessor, the film that Doomsday exists to follow up on — was not a film where everything was locked from day one. It was a film where three years of planning, two years of production, and a post-production timeline long enough to make most studio executives nervous produced something that worked. The narrative stitching across four films’ worth of setups was real. So was the emotional logic of the final battle. That’s not an accident. That’s years of filmmakers treating the material as something that keeps living until the Very Last Frame.

If you want to be cynical about it, sure, Marvel has greenlit films with incomplete scripts before and gotten lucky. But “gotten lucky” undersells the Russos’ specific contribution to the MCU, which is that they made sprawling ensemble storytelling feel emotionally legible. That’s a skill that doesn’t come from a finished script. It comes from knowing how to listen to actors and how to cut a scene two months after you shot it.

The 2018 Argument, Slightly Different This Time

Back in 2018, James Gunn said DC’s first attempts at a connected universe failed in part because the scripts weren’t ready and the studio pushed forward anyway. He then killed one project outright, saying he “couldn’t do a movie where the screenplay’s not good.” That was a creator with real leverage — a director-star whose name on the poster was the entire marketing campaign — making a line in the sand.

The Russos have that same leverage now. They got Endgame to $2.8 billion. They got Tom Holland to carry three films. They brought back Downey Jr. from a decades-long unofficial retirement in the role that made him a global star. If a Russo wanted to walk because the script wasn’t there, Marvel would listen very carefully — the same way the studio listened when Deadpool & Wolverine proved that R-rated chaos could coexist with a shared universe’s messaging.

The fact that they’re not walking — that they’re publicly defending a living-organism approach while actively shooting — tells you they believe in the version of the process they’re describing. That’s worth more than a perfectly finished draft on paper, at least where these two are concerned.

Doctor Doom Is the Unwritten Part Everyone’s Actually Talking About

Here’s the part of this story that isn’t about scripts at all: Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom is the single most daring recasting in the history of the MCU, and the Russos have to make that work while the rest of the cast is trying to figure out who they are in this new, multi-universal version of the franchise.

Downey Jr.’s original Iron Man was a character defined by improvisation — the ad-libs, the off-the-cuff wit, the way RDJ could take a line of dialogue and make it sound like it had never been written. Doctor Doom, in the comics, is a character of immense powers, immense pride, and a tragic inability to see his own limitations. The challenge isn’t whether the script is finished. The challenge is whether any script can hold a version of Doom that works for the general audience, for the comic fans, for the X-Men audience, and for the people who last saw Downey Jr. as a hero in 2019.

The Russos’ “living organism” approach to the script may actually be the smartest way to handle that. If the character is going to live or die on Downey Jr.’s performance, you don’t lock the page too early. You give the actor room. You give yourself room. You write toward the performance you can see, not the one you imagined.

That’s not an argument against finished scripts as an ideal. It’s an argument that the ideal and the reality are sometimes different things, and that with the right filmmakers the difference doesn’t have to be a bug.

What It Means for the Rest of the MCU

The Russos are explicitly not trying to answer for the entirety of the MCU. Anthony Russo told the AP that their job is the “specific intersection” where they and Marvel meet. That’s a smart framing — they’re keeping their lane, and Marvel is trusting them to keep it.

For audiences, the practical question is whether the living-organism approach produces a film that hangs together on screen. The Russos’ last big ensemble film, the one where Captain America, Thor, and the full roster came back for one last fight in Civil War‘s shadow, had a narrative logic so clean that people still debate whether its time heist was a trick or a thesis. If Doomsday has that same quality — a film where everything connects even if it wasn’t all connected on paper — then the script conversation becomes a footnote.

That’s the question hanging over the next few months. Is Doomsday the Russos being honest about their process, or is it a filmmakers’ defense that only sounds good until opening weekend? The Avengers have survived worse questions than this. But they’ve never had to answer one quite this loud.

Either way, Avengers: Doomsday lands in theaters in December. By then we’ll know whether the Russos made the right call, and whether “living organism” means something in practice that it doesn’t in a press quote. And the Oppenheimer debate about whether great films need finished scripts will have its most expensive test case yet.