Avengers: Doomsday Currently Filming…Without a Completed Script! Is the Film Doomed?

Avengers: Doomsday Currently Filming…Without a Completed Script! Is the Film Doomed? 

Avengers: Doomsday is currently being filmed and scheduled to release in December 2026. Recently there's been reports and quotes about Doomsday’s script not being finished and being reworked. I have some thoughts on this so let’s talk about it! 

General Information

The first thing to talk about here is a couple weeks back, Michael Waldron who wrote Loki and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse confirmed that he’s still working on Avengers: Doomsday. If you don’t know, before Avengers 5 was changed from Kang Dynasty to Doomsday, Michael Waldron was the main writer behind Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars. Once the film changed titles and The Russo Brothers came in, Stephen McFreely was brought on to work on the script. He previously wrote Infinity War and Endgame. The thought was that Waldron left once The Russo Brothers came in, there were rumors about that happening. Waldron confirmed that he never left and he's still working on the film. When it was confirmed that Waldron was helping with the screenplay, people thought that meant that he was fixing it and reworking it. It doesn't look like that, it sounds like the reason behind it is he never left and he’s always been working on this film. 

The other thing to talk about here before I share my thoughts is this past weekend was San Diego Comic Con. At that con, Rebecca Romijn, Mystique from the original X-Men trilogy was there to promote Star Trek: Strange New World. She was asked about Doomsday and if she finished filming her scenes, this is what her response was. “I’m not quite sure. The script hasn’t, they haven’t finished writing it. It’s been very, very fun, and we don’t know yet. They keep everything very close to the vest themselves in an effort to keep everything under wraps.” This quote was shared all over Instagram and Twitter with people being very concerned about the film. That’s sort of our Segway into discussing my thoughts and concerns about this.

My Thoughts

My excitement level for Avengers: Doomsday has been all over the place. It’s now been a year since Robert Downey Jr was announced as Doctor Doom at San Diego Comic Con. A lot of people including myself were very concerned and frustrated by this idea of them being so desperate after multiple years of failures to bring back their star for the next Avengers film. Back in March, Marvel did a 5 hour long live stream announcing the cast for the film. Despite knowing the cast, it didn’t really raise my excitement because I still didn’t know what this film was going to be or what it was going to be about. With the release for Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps my excitement for the film went up a bit. The simple reason for that is because the mid-credit scenes teased Doomsday in major ways. In both cases, I felt like I understood more of what Doomsday was going to be about. It felt like the MCU was coming together and being cohesive again. They even pushed Doomsday and Secret Wars back seven months to give the films more time. My excitement for the film was starting to go up, I still wasn’t full blown excited or as excited as I was for Infinity War and Endgame. 

Then these quotes come out from Romjin about Doomsday and I’m not sure what to think anymore. Kelsey Grammar (Beast) and David Harbour (Red Guardian) have said they haven’t seen a completed script. Those quotes don’t mean much to me because I figured the script was being kept secret to avoid leaks. That’s what happened for Infinity War and Endgame, where the actors were given fake scripts. Romjin says this is something new because we now know the script isn’t finished yet despite filming starting in April. The cast of Doomsday is currently 27 people (there’s probably a lot more), how deep should we look into Romjin’s quotes, is she the right person to be saying this? I don’t know. If these quotes came from The Russo Brothers, Kevin Feige, or even Robert Downey Jr I think it’ll hit differently. But if one of the cast members is saying that the script isn’t finished yet, we should have red flags. 

Right out of the gate, it’s never a good idea to start filming a movie without a finished script. I’m not in Hollywood, I don’t make movies (I hope too though) but it seems like a very obvious objective is to have your script finished before you start filming. On a film of Doomsday’s scale, whose budget could be almost $500 million filming with an incomplete script is very worrisome. This is probably going to be the biggest movie of the MCU. With how rocky the MCU has been lately, they need Doomsday to be a win. If Doomsday either bombs at the box office or gets mediocre reviews, the MCU is in trouble. If both of those things happen then the MCU is dead. Kevin Feige has acknowledged that they do have plans for the MCU post-Secret Wars but if Doomsday doesn’t work then Marvel is going to be dead. It’s just so frustrating that an Avengers movie that I should so easily be excited for, is one that I’m moderately excited for but also have a lot of concerns. We’ll still months out but unless there’s a lot of really good news, Avengers Doomsday probably isn’t going to be my most anticipated of 2026 which is weird. Of 2018 and 2019 you can probably guess what my most anticipated film of the year was. 

I think Doomsday is being a victim of the MCU’s Multiverse Saga not doing a great job of building towards something. We know Doctor Doom is the main villain, but we haven’t seen him in an MCU film. The fact that our introduction to Doctor Doom is going to be in Avengers Doomsday is not a good sign. Beyond that, this film is having to balance a whole lot. It’s having to introduce our Avengers, establish our Avengers, get MCU’s F4 to the main Earth, explain who Fox X-Men ties into the plot, explain the tension between Sam Wilson and Thunderbolts*, and introduce Doctor Doom all into one movie. I felt like after Kang fell through with Quantumania’s poor reception and Jonathan Majors being fired they should’ve stepped back from Doomsday for months and reevaluated things and come up with a plan that best suits the situation they’re in.