Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars director Joe Russo recently described the upcoming films as a “beginning. It’s a new beginning.”
Speaking with Omelete, Russo said, “What’s compelling about these two new Avengers movies is they are a beginning. It’s a new beginning. So we told an ending story and now we’re telling a beginning story. And then who knows where we’ll go from there.”
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Anthony Russo would later share, “We didn’t know what our road forward was in the MCU after we finished Endgame. We weren’t sure what it was. And what happened was a creative idea just came to us and that ended up feeling like the right idea. So it motivated us to do it again.”
“We feel like we have something fresh,” he continued. “We feel like we have a story that’s like important to be told. We have an amazing group of collaborators again, some old and some new. And we’re just very excited. It’s a difficult movie. There’s a lot of expectations.”
Joe Russo would also reveal that Kevin Feige had the idea to bring back Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom.
He said, “That was Kevin [Feige]. And interesting enough about that, that conversation was had a while ago. And then Robert [Downey Jr.] tried to talk us into doing it and we said, ‘No.’ Weirdly, because we said we wouldn’t come back. We just didn’t have a story. We didn’t have a way in so we were resistant for awhile.”
“And then one day Steve McFeely, who’s one of our key collaborators said, ‘I have an idea.’ And he called us to pit, and we went, ‘That’s the story. That story has to be told. It’s a really powerful story.’”
Russo then teased the films, “We love villains who think they’re the heroes of their own stories. That’s when thy become three-dimensional and become more interesting. And when you have an actor like Robert Downey, you have to create a well-shaped three dimensional character for the audience. That’s where a lot of our focus is going.”
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Russo’s comments could potentially corroborate rumors that the films will act as a soft reboot for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Back in 2023, scooper Syl Abdul stated, “Sounding like MCU Earth 616 will no longer exist after Secret Wars.”
He elaborated in a video, “Is this going to reboot the MCU as we know it? Now, the concept in 2015 Jonathan Hickman’s Secret Wars is that all of these different Earths were kind of molded together. Yes, Feige is basically taking pieces of stuff that he wants to keep from all of this different realities and he’s going to put it together as a new Marvel universe.”
“The MCU Earth 616 as we know it, that’s going to be gone,” he reiterated. “Not as far as erasing the history of the stories, but that’s not going to be the same Marvel Universe by the end of Secret Wars.”
Later in the video, he added, “But with Secret Wars this is really [Feige’s] chance to, again, wipe the slate clean of stuff you don’t really want to do going forward. Then you bring in your mutants. You bring in Fantastic Four. You really do something special for the entire Marvel Universe.”
However, Marvel TV boss Brad Winderbaum recently commented on the idea of a full reboot saying, “Every time there’s been a full reboot in DC, DC in particular, you can’t really fully reboot anything. The classics always come back around. It’s a very difficult thing to do to a living, breathing fictional universe, to just start from scratch because of all the fan investment and love for the stories that have come so far.”
What do you make of the Russos describing their upcoming films as a “beginning?”
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I just hope they let the Russo's do what they do best and don't try to force any of that identity politics crap into the film. That all female team that ran for about 30-60 seconds in EndGame was about as much of that as people are wiling to tolerate any more so Disney best wise up or this attempted reboot will fail as badly as phase 4. No one wants a Boss babe Avengers period!