The Russo Brothers are on their way back to Marvel for Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. After a few years away to do things like Netflix’s The Electric State (available now), Joe and Anthony Russo are set to tell another MCU-spanning epic, just as they did for Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
So what makes this time different? Well, for one thing, they aren’t wrapping up a years-long story. This time around they’re kicking one off…
“What’s compelling about these two ‘Avengers’ movies is that they are a beginning; it’s a new beginning,” Joe Russo told Omelet. “We told an ending story, and now we’re going to tell a beginning story, and who knows where we’ll go from there. Maybe it’ll be another five years, but I think we needed that time and perspective to figure out where it needed to go next.”
“We feel like we have something [a concept that is] fresh; we feel like we have something important to be told,” Anthony Russo said. “We have an amazing group of collaborators again, some old and some new. We’re very excited. It’s a difficult movie, there’s a lot of expectations on it.”
There have been a ton of questions surrounding the return of Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom. Is he actually playing Victor von Doom or an alternate version of Tony Stark? Joe Russo shed some light, revealing more about the character than we’ve heard thus far…
“The only thing I’ll say about the movie is this: we love villains who think they are the heroes of their own stories. That’s when they become three-dimensional and when they become more interesting,” he said. “And when you have an actor like Robert Downey Jr., you have to create a well-shaped, three-dimensional character for the audience. That’s where a lot of our focus is going.”
Now, that sounds like Tony Stark. If you’ll recall, his desire to protect the planet was what gave birth to Ultron. It wouldn’t take much to imagine Stark going even further to stop an even bigger threat to humanity in ‘Doomsday’.
At the same time, this all sounds very similar to Thanos, who also saw himself as the hero of his own story. That’s partly what made Infinity War so awesome, because it was framed by Thanos on his “hero journey” to save the universe. Of course, he had to kill half the population to do it, ultimately making him a villain. It’s all a matter of perspective, and the best bad guys don’t see themselves as evil.
Avengers: Doomsday opens on May 1st 2026, while Secret Wars hits on May 7th 2027.
