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Avengers: Doomsday is easily the most important movie for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, both in the fictional world and in our own. Within the MCU, Doomsday sees the arrival of Doctor Doom, who will surely use the incursions that threaten to wipe out the multiverse as a means to shore up more power. Within our timeline, Doomsday is an attempt to revive interest in a somewhat 2020s franchise, in part by bringing back favorite actors like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans.
With so much on the line, one would think that Kevin Feige and directors Joe and Anthony Russo would be working to make Doomsday as precise as possible, poring over every scene and every line of dialogue months before arriving to set. But it turns out the opposite is true.
“We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors,” Joe Russo told Variety this week. “We like to see what the actors bring to the characters. 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.” Those comments are true, at least as far as the MCU is concerned, because that improvisational approach helped make Iron Man such a success in 2008, starting the path that leads to Doomsday.
In 2008, just weeks before Iron Man hit theaters, director Jon Favreau shared “the dirty secret” about superhero films with the website SuperHeroHype. “These movies don’t really have scripts which are locked in a traditional sense,” he revealed. “The script is unfortunately the last thing to get proper attention.” Instead Favreau explained that he relied on improvised lines between star Robert Downey Jr. and his co-stars. “Hopefully, it gives [Iron Man] a more naturalistic feel than most of these big movies that feel very sort high-bound by the size of the production.”
Favreau’s gamble paid off. Iron Man was a colossal hit, not so much because of its big action set pieces; most viewers would be forgiven if they couldn’t recall the specific beats of the climactic fight between Iron Man and the Iron Monger. Rather the film dazzled viewers because of Downey’s sparkling performance and his chemistry with Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts. And most of that came from improvisation, a playfulness that cut the seriousness and big sci-fi concepts with a dash of humanity. Even the most famous line in the movie, the one that cemented Tony Stark as the center of a shared cinematic universe, was improvised by Downey: “I am Iron Man.”
The playfulness between characters has always been the defining quality of the MCU. Some of the films certainly have memorable fight scenes; people still cheer for the hand-to-hand combat in The Winter Soldier, and Joss Whedon brought splash-page bravado to big oners in The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron. But the primary draw remains the MCU’s likable characters and seeing them hang out together. The shot of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes sitting in a restaurant and munching on shawarma is just as important to The Avengers as the tracking shot that shows them each using their powers against the Chitauri.
Clearly Avengers: Doomsday wants to harness some of the warm feelings audiences have for MCU characters. Even if the film has a perfect explanation for Victor Von Doom to look exactly like Tony Stark, even if the return of Steve Rogers will seem like the natural progression for the character we’ve known, everyone knows they’re actually back because Marvel wants to play the hits again. It’s the same reason the film will feature all of the Fox X-Men back together despite the actors having said goodbye to their characters countless times at this point.
With all that in mind, it makes sense for the Russos to go back to first principles of the MCU. Doomsday will gather charismatic, well-liked actors, put them in a room together, and let them riff on the characters that they’ve made into global icons. But that impulse to return to what worked before also risks everything less stellar with the MCU. The franchise managed to overcome early problems like a lack of defining villains and a tendency to build climaxes around lasers pointing into the sky to offer some truly inspiring movies. Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and Black Panther. Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame remain triumphs, the rare instance of bringing serialized storytelling to feature films.
Yet, those success have proven to be culminations of the Marvel style. There’s nothing more to be done or said with the style, and some audiences are tiring of it. Even very good films like Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings or Thunderbolts* fail to connect with viewers because audiences have seen it all before and it doesn’t impress them anymore.
Doomsday could have been a chance to change course for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Doctor Doom is the purest comic book villain to ever exist, something more outrageous and compelling than even the franchise’s previous greats like Loki and Killmonger. The Secret Wars storyline that it adapts from the comics is a superhero epic of the highest caliber. Doomsday gave Marvel and the Russos an opportunity to revitalize the franchise. Instead they’re holding to a method that worked great two decades ago but feels diminishing now. By ignoring their movie’s script, the Russos are ironically following a well-worn script, and we already know how that ends.
Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theaters on Dec. 18, 2026.
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