It’s a well-known quirk of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that many of its chief architects came up through the world of comedy—notably Joe and Anthony Russo, who cut their teeth on shows like Arrested Development and Community before becoming the planet’s most box office-dominating action filmmakers. But while the Russos now spend their days figuring out which recognizable bit of IP should come out of/slam into which glowing portal, they do apparently still feel nostalgic for their old comedy days—which is, among other things, how they justified starting work on this December’s Avengers: Doomsday without actually having a completed script for one of the planet’s biggest movies on hand.
“We always view the script as a living organism,” Joe Russo told the AP this week. “We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors. 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.”
Said “magic” certainly makes things sound a lot cleaner and more joyfully spontaneous than “This thing’s been a clusterfuck since the beginning,” a sentiment that dates through a whole bunch of post-Russo Marvel films that audiences shrugged at, and then sort of exploded when Disney cut ties with Jonathan Majors, who was supposed to be the central spoke of both this Avengers film and the next one. Occasional reports from Doosmday‘s massive cast of chair-fillers have made the whole thing sound like an unwieldy collection of cameos, too, with guys like Alan Cumming—returning to the X-Men franchise after more than 20 years away—describing filming their scenes in scenery-shrouded blank voids completely cut off from other performers. So, yeah: It’s not that Marvel has been veering around wildly trying to figure out a satisfying plot hook to try to recreate Avengers: Endgame with new creators, before just throwing up their hands and deciding to get the band back together: It’s that, like all of us, the Russos just love improv too dang much to commit themselves to a completed script before cameras started rolling on a film that huge portions of Disney’s fortunes will be relying on.
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