There’s a philosophy for athletes and creative folk, especially, where you want to quit while you’re ahead so that you can go out on top. Some athletes retire after winning the title at the end of the season. And then you have filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino that want to end their directing careers after only 10 features so that he doesn’t overstay his welcome with fans. Very few people actually get the chance to walk away at the top of their game, but that’s exactly what the Russo Brothers did when they ended their run at Marvel Studios with the record-breaking feature “Avengers: Endgame.” So, as you might expect, it would take something truly special to get them to sully that ending and work on yet another Marvel film. Something like “Secret Wars,” perhaps?
Before ‘Endgame’ premiered last year, the brothers were asked what it would take to come back to Marvel Studios. The only thing they could think of would be “Secret Wars.” Now, speaking to BroBible, the filmmaking duo explained why “Secret Wars” is really the only story that would suffice.
“You know, I read [‘Secret Wars’] when I was 10 or 11, and it was the scale of getting all of the heroes together,” explained Joe Russo. “It was one of the first major books to do that — that was really event-storytelling to me at its finest. And what happens when you put all of those personalities together. I also like the idea of villains having to team up with heroes. Anth and I like complicated relationships between heroes and villains, we like villains who believe they’re heroes in their own stories, so it’s all sort of built into this notion of ‘Secret Wars.’ To execute something on the scale of ‘Infinity War’ was directly related to the dream of ‘Secret Wars,’ which is even larger in scale.
Anthony Russo added, “It would be the biggest movie you could possibly imagine, so that’s what really excites us about the story — the ambition of it is even bigger than the ambition of the Infinity Saga.”
For those not familiar with “Secret Wars,” the series has a fairly basic premise—a cosmic entity, The Beyonder, is fascinated by Earth’s superheroes and creates a planet called Battleworld. He then teleports the world’s superheroes and villains to the planet to, uh, battle each other. There are twists and turns aplenty, as you might expect from a Marvel comic book series. Unfortunately, though popular, “Secret Wars” offers more spectacle than story, so if Marvel Studios and Kevin Feige wanted to work towards that event, they’d likely have to flesh it out a bit more.
That being said, the Russos are absolutely correct that “Secret Wars” is really the only film that would have the ability to top the Infinity Saga in terms of scale. So, if fans are excited about the possibility of the Russos returning to the MCU, it’s going to have to be something bigger than ‘Endgame,’ and that’s no easy feat.