UPDATE: A new Avengers: Doomsday test screening reportedly scored higher than Endgame, with an unfinished post-credits scene that was just filmed included in the cut.
Joe Russo just said out loud what has been reported since before cameras rolled: Avengers: Doomsday went into production without a finished script.
“We always view the script as a living organism,” Russo told the Associated Press in a new interview.
“We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors,” he 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.”
Doomsday is the Russos’ first Marvel movie since Avengers: Endgame, with Robert Downey Jr. debuting as Doctor Doom after the Jonathan Majors firing blew up the original Kang Dynasty plans.
“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 added. “We intersect it in a very specific way. It’s that intersection which is where we can make sense of things.”
The script talk has followed this movie all year. It came up when Matt Belloni put Doomsday‘s seven-month delay on “The Russos” — the move that cost Marvel its IMAX screens in December.
Gunn Says Unfinished Scripts Are Killing The Movies
Variety pairs the Russo quotes with James Gunn, who took over DC Studios vowing cameras would never roll on a DC movie 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 said DC even killed a greenlit project over it: “Everybody wanted to make the movie. It was greenlit, ready to go. The screenplay wasn’t ready. And I couldn’t do a movie where the screenplay’s not good.”
Lanterns Did The Same Thing, And Supergirl Bombed Anyway
Here’s what that comparison leaves out.
Gunn’s own Lanterns was filmed without finished scripts.
Star Kyle Chandler told The Hollywood Reporter the eight-episode season was block-shot before all eight scripts existed: “The full storyline wasn’t in front of us; it was described to us.”
That’s the same show Gunn held up in that same Rolling Stone interview as proof his system worked: “And then Lanterns came in, and the script was so f-cking good.”
Supergirl went through the full script-first process, and it left theaters as the lowest-grossing DC movie ever.
Back in June, our insiders pointed at Supergirl and said Gunn has gone back to the Marvel way of doing things. Chandler’s interview backed that up on the record.
So the difference between the two studios isn’t the process.
Marvel shoots without finished scripts and says so.
Gunn made not doing that his whole pitch, and his biggest show did it anyway while the movie that followed the rule became DC’s lowest-grossing ever.
We find out if the living organism delivers on December 18, when Avengers: Doomsday opens in Infinity Vision, with IMAX in China.
