For a while now, Marvel has been trying to convince audiences that “Avengers: Doomsday” won’t be just another giant crossover film, but instead will reconnect the MCU to the weight and finality of “Avengers: Endgame.” Now, ‘Doomsday’ co-director Joe Russo has spelled out exactly how literal that plan will be. Speaking at the Sands Film Festival in St Andrews last night about the upcoming September theatrical return of ‘Endgame,’ announced at CinemaCon last weekend (via Deadline), Russo said Marvel’s re-release is no mere nostalgia lap. Instead, it will actively fold new material into the re-release so it can serve as a narrative runway into December’s next event film.
Russo put it plainly. “It’s critically important to re-release the movie, and, in fact, we’ll be re-releasing the film with footage that is set in the Doomsday story that we have added to ‘Avengers: Endgame,’” he said. “It’s an opportunity to create a bridge from Endgame to Doomsday in a very unique way, and because the movie was so successful, we have an opportunity to re-release it. You don’t always get the chance to re-release because it costs money, so the fact that we can enhance the story of Doomsday by bridging it to Endgame and these characters that we worked with for years that we love so much, and continue their story: It’s a really unique opportunity.”
Russo then pushed the idea even further, describing the re-release as a “critical companion story” and “a setup for what you’re gonna watch in December when you see ‘Avengers Doomsday.’”
Meanwhile, in a separate interview with Entertainment Weekly this week, Kevin Feige shifted from the mechanics of the “Endgame” re-release to the larger gamble at the center of “Avengers: Doomsday”: bringing Robert Downey Jr. back not as Tony Stark, but as Victor von Doom.
Feige said the timing of the idea mattered, especially as Downey’s post- “Oppenheimer” stature made the move feel even bigger. “At the time, [Downey] was on his way to winning the Academy Award for Oppenheimer, and there was every story about ‘the greatest actor in the world,’ and we thought, ‘This could be it. Let’s do it,” Feige said. “It’s our universe. It’s a multiverse. We can do whatever the heck we want. He played the most iconic hero. Let’s have him play the most iconic villain.”
Anthony Russo then widened that out to how the Russos are thinking about Doom as a character, arguing that the appeal is not just raw scale, but the vulnerability that lies beneath it. “Certainly, with Doom, it’s the problem in the extreme in that his power is so immense and so beyond. But that really liberates us all on a creative level, artistic level, to figure out where the complexities and the vulnerabilities are in the character,” Russo said. “They may have seemingly unlimited physical power, but there is something inside them where they are vulnerable, where they are exposed, where [there are] places that they need to protect even more intently than their physical selves. So I think the real fun of the storytelling is in that zone there.”
All of which makes Marvel’s plan pretty plain: use “Endgame” as the emotional on-ramp, then sell “Doomsday” as both escalation and reinvention — the old MCU endpoint repurposed as the beginning of something darker, stranger, and built around Downey’s turn from its defining hero into its next defining villain. “Avengers: Endgame” returns on September 25, with “Avengers: Doomsday” arriving on December 18.
