A year ago at San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel officially announced that Robert Downey Jr. would play Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday. And now, a year later, the movie is three months into production… Except, uh, they haven’t finished writing the script.
“[I’m] not quite sure,” Mystique actress Rebecca Romijn told THR at this year’s SDCC when asked if she was done shooting her scenes in the new movie.. “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.”
Avengers: Doomsday began production on April 28, 2025, and it’s now July 27, 2025, as of this writing. That’s three months into production, and while, as Romijn alludes to, Marvel Studios often keeps things tight to their vest, only offering sides — i.e., portions of the script, versus the whole thing — to actors… Not finishing the script 90 days into production is still a little bizarre. Perhaps she misspoke; after all, Comic-Con is a whirl of interviews and panels that can throw any actor (or interviewer). But this is also par for the course for Marvel. It’s a feature, according to them, but a bug.
“We’ve never started a movie without a full script and I have never been satisfied with a script that we’ve had,” Kevin Feige said during a recent roundtable, per Variety, before Fantastic Four: First Steps opened. “I’ve never been satisfied with a movie we’ve released.”
It’s an idea that’s been in place since the improvisational, seat-of-the-pants approach director Jon Favreau took for 2008’s Iron Man, and something that has stuck for nearly every production Marvel has put out, through Avengers: Endgame, one of the most successful movies of all time. One of the lone exceptions to this approach has been James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies, which Gunn has said have scripts locked before they go to camera. And that’s something Gunn has repeated that they will continue, time and again, with his new DC Studios productions… Until he’s personally happy with a script, they won’t greenlight a movie or TV show.
Look, clearly for a good, long while, Marvel has been incredibly successful with this approach, with few exceptions. But since the downturn of the studios post-2019, there seems to be a clear lack of reassessment on what is or is not working. In the sit-down with Feige, he laments that audiences don’t like “homework.” Which is true, but far from the only reason the movies and TV shows have not been hitting the same way, this weekend’s box office for Fantastic Four: First Steps aside. The general, underlying message from Feige seems to be to stay the course: only two-three movies per year instead of four, one TV show a year, full steam ahead otherwise.
Yet the issue — the main, underlying issue — since 2019 has been the quality of the productions, not the number of them. Yes, the volume increased, and that was a concern. Yes, there was COVID, then dual strikes that knocked off the schedule. But there was a time in the past when pretty much everything out of Marvel Studios was a C+ at worst, but generally was a fine time at the movie theater, and usually better than that. While opinions may naturally vary project by project, and person by person, there’s a clear quality issue at play here since 2019 that has led Marvel to go from “must see” to “mixed bag.”
One area where you can definitely improve this sort of thing? Making sure your script is good and locked before production. That doesn’t mean you’re done with the process. Film is a collaboration, not a singular vision. And through working with actors on set, editing afterwards, and potential reshoots and test screenings, you can tweak and hopefully make your movie (or TV show) better. But heading into a massive production like Avengers: Doomsday and its direct sequel Avengers: Secret Wars without a solid foundation is a shaky prospect, at best, and a recipe for disaster at worst.
Could it all turn out fine? For sure, Marvel has been winging it in certain respects for nearly 20 years. But with the MCU on shaky ground anyway, they really need to start thinking about that script foundation before they get to set. At least for Rebecca Romijn, if no one else.
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