‘Avengers: Doomsday’ Shot Without a Finished Script, but Co-Director Joe Russo Says ‘We Always View’ the Screenplay as a ‘Living Organism’

“Avengers: Doomsday” going into production without a finished script did not faze directors Joe and Anthony Russo. As the former recently told the Associated Press: “We always view the script as a living organism.” “We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors,” Joe maintained. “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.” The Russo Brothers are making their grand return to Marvel with “Doomsday,” which marks their first MCU tentpole since the record-breaking “Avengers: Endgame.” The duo had not planned to come back for the next “Avengers” movie, which was originally going to be “The Kang Dynasty” and feature Jonathan Majors as the new Thanos-sized villain. But Majors got the boot from Marvel amid legal troubles, and the fifth “Avengers” movie had to be overhauled. That’s when the Russo Brothers stepped in alongside Robert Downey Jr., who is rejoining the MCU after the end of his Iron Man tenure to debut as the villainous Doctor Doom. Popular on Variety “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 about coming back. “We intersect it in a very specific way. It’s that intersection which is where we can make sense of things.” Marvel has a grand reputation for starting production on its movies without finished scripts. When “Guardians of the Galaxy” trilogy director James Gunn took over DC Studios, he vowed not to fall down this rabbit hole and only move into production on DC movies with finalized screenplays. “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 noted at the time that DC Studios recently “killed a project” because the script just couldn’t get to the right place, explaining: “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.”