Category - Entertainment
'Avengers: Doomsday' Writers Originally Said "F--- No" to One Comic Book Arc
When Avengers: Endgame ended a very specific era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the directors of that film, the Russo Brothers, didn't think they'd return to the franchise anytime soon. After all, they had not only helmed Captain America: Civil War but done the heavy lifting of bringing several movie threads together for Avengers: Infinity War. You would think that after all of that, Joe and Anthony Russo, and their writing pal, Steven McFeely, would be done. But they weren't. None of them.
Starting next year, we'll get another multi-part Russo Brothers Marvel movie event; Avengers: Doomsday in 2026, followed by Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027. Broadly speaking, both films are thought to loosely adapt a Marvel Comics storyline called "Secret Wars" in which various Marvel heroes and villains battle each other outside of their usual setting. But, it turns out, the Russos and McFeely nearly turned down tackling this arc altogether. In a brand-new interview with Empire, the team revealed that one initial response to returning to adapt this storyline was not positive.
"You [Steven McFeely] were like, ‘F--k no. Absolutely not.’ And then you hung up." Joe Russo said in the new interview and mentioned that he had pitched the idea of McFeely working on a movie adaptation of the 1984–1985 comics arc Secret Wars. But, then, according to Joe Russo, he got a call "the next morning at 7:30," because the screenwriter "had an idea."

From here, it seems that the general feeling of Secret Wars began to take shape. Was there some specific aspect of the Secret Wars arc that McFeely didn't like? Was the concept—in which a cosmic force called the Beyonder creates a place called "Battleworld"—simply too unwieldy? Right now, we don't know what changed McFeely's mind, because any specific story details of how Doomsday and Secret Wars unfold would, naturally, be full of spoilers.
But, we do know that just a few years ago, the path to Secret Wars was not going to be focused on Dr. Doom at all. Instead, a now-scrapped film called Avengers: The Kang Dynasty would have been happening around now. But, after Marvel fell out with Jonathan Majors, who played the titular villain, the entire MCU pivoted to the course it's on now.
There were ideas that we were trying to wrap our heads around that preceded this one, and we just never found the story," Joe Russo said in the new Empire interview, to which Anthony Russo added: "Endgame was the end, and it took a little time for us to begin to think about it as something other than an end."
Avengers: Doomsday will hit theaters on May 1, 2026. Avengers: Secret Wars will hit theaters on May 7, 2027.
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