The Russos have a fight in Avengers: Doomsday they want everyone to see: Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi vs. Channing Tatum’s Gambit.
“I can’t wait till you see the Simu and Channing fight,” came the tease in the directors’ new Fandango interview.
The Doomsday trailer already gave a glimpse, showing Gambit squaring off with Shang-Chi and Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique taking on Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova.
“Who’s Most Compelling To Fight Who?”
The Russos said cooking up those matchups is the fun part of the job.
“We’re like kids with toys. When we start thinking about sequences like that, we literally have toys and go, wow, who would it be?” they said.
“Who’s most compelling to fight who? What would be the most fun to watch? What do we want to see? What do the fans want to see?” they continued.
“It’s a lot of comic book nerds who all work on the movie together, just excited about trying to find a way to bring these things to life for the audience,” they added.
“It Has To Be Ian McKellen”
Asked which X-Men they were most excited to get their hands on, the Russos didn’t hesitate.
“It has to be Ian McKellen, Magneto. It’s one of our favorite characters. Two, it’s Ian McKellen,” they said.
“The fact that we were able to work with him, and to see that level of acting up close and personal, was spectacular,” they continued.
They added, “A particular thrill was some of the newer people in the X-Men universe. Channing Tatum as Gambit is a real treat.”
The Russos also talked about what it means to have the X-Men in the MCU at all, with Alan Cumming back as Nightcrawler among the returning cast.
“X-Men came out 25 years ago. We were fans in a movie theater watching those movies at midnight screenings,” they said.
“Those characters had a connection in the comics, and then as they segued into the cinema, it got divided between different Hollywood studios. We never imagined the day that they could find their way back to one another,” they continued.
“So the fact that we can be the facilitators of that and activate that through this movie is like, we have to pinch ourselves,” they explained.
In the same interview, they shared the film’s runtime, broke down Doom vs. Thanos, and teased a very surprising ending.
Avengers: Doomsday, from directors Joe and Anthony Russo, is in theaters December 18.
