Anthony Russo on the Toughest Challenge in the MCU
Avengers: Endgame earned $2.798 billion worldwide, briefly dethroning Avatar as the highest-grossing film in cinema history. That number represents the ceiling of what Marvel Studios built with characters audiences had spent more than a decade learning to love. Now Anthony Russo, one-half of the directing team returning to helm Avengers: Doomsday, has spoken publicly about the pressure that accompanies that legacy — specifically, the grinding difficulty of moving iconic characters forward without losing the qualities that made audiences care in the first place.
In remarks reported by Variety, Russo acknowledged that finding the equilibrium between narrative evolution and character preservation can be "very difficult." It's a candid admission that cuts to the heart of what makes serialized superhero filmmaking different from almost every other genre in Hollywood. Unlike a standalone drama, the MCU's characters arrive at each new installment carrying the weight of a decade-plus of audience investment. The stakes of getting that balance wrong are not just critical — they are commercial, cultural, and deeply personal to millions of viewers.
The challenge Anthony Russo Marvel characters face in Doomsday is, in many ways, the defining creative problem of the franchise's current era.
The Tension Between Innovation and Icon Preservation
Film scholars who study franchise storytelling have a term for the bind Russo is describing: legacy character syndrome. The concept holds that long-running serialized narratives eventually reach a point where beloved characters become so fixed in the public imagination that any significant change registers as betrayal rather than growth. It's a structural trap, and it does not discriminate between intellectual properties. The same tension has played out in the James Bond franchise, Star Wars, and the DC Extended Universe, each producing their own case studies in how easily studios can alienate audiences who feel possessive of fictional identities.
Read next 1963 : le tube yéyé qui a enflammé la France — reconnaîtrez-vous cette voix ?What makes the MCU's version of this problem uniquely acute is scale. Marvel has asked audiences to follow the same roster of characters across more than 30 feature films and dozens of hours of streaming television. That volume of exposure creates an unusually intimate parasocial relationship between viewer and character. Polling from Morning Consult conducted in the post-Endgame years consistently showed Iron Man and Captain America ranking among the most recognizable fictional brand ambassadors in American pop culture — figures whose cultural footprint extended well beyond the multiplex.
When those characters change — or when their successors arrive — the response from dedicated audiences is rarely neutral. Reddit communities like r/marvelstudios, which counts millions of members, generate hundreds of threads following any significant creative decision about character arcs. Audience score data on Rotten Tomatoes tells a similar story. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), which pushed Thor's comedic characterization further than prior entries, earned an audience score of roughly 76 percent — notably lower than Thor: Ragnarok's 87 percent and a stark contrast to the near-universal enthusiasm that greeted Endgame. The discourse around that gap centered precisely on what Russo is describing: the feeling that a character had been moved somewhere his established identity didn't support.
Avengers: Doomsday and the Stakes for the MCU's Next Era
Avengers: Doomsday arrives at a moment when the franchise is under more scrutiny than at any prior point in its history. The MCU's post-Endgame output has been commercially successful in aggregate, but the internal variation in critical and audience reception has been wider than the studio experienced during its first three phases. Films like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania opened large but generated muted long-term enthusiasm, with analysts at firms like Comscore and PostTrak noting declining repeat viewing rates compared to the Infinity Saga era.
Against that backdrop, Doomsday functions as a reset opportunity and a high-wire act simultaneously. The film presumably carries a roster of characters in various states of narrative flux — some introduced in the streaming era, some veterans of the original six Avengers, and some whose arcs have been complicated by real-world circumstances, including the departure of Robert Downey Jr. from the role of Tony Stark. Each of those variables represents a version of the tension Russo flagged: how do you honor what the audience already knows while giving them something they haven't seen?
The Russo Brothers' track record with exactly this problem is the reason their return to the franchise carries so much weight. Avengers: Infinity War, their first entry in the culminating saga, managed to introduce Thanos as a credible ideological antagonist while servicing the emotional arcs of more than a dozen major characters — all without the film collapsing under its own ensemble weight. Its $2.048 billion global gross was a validation of that balance. Endgame deepened it, finding room for character-defining moments — Steve Rogers lifting Mjolnir, Tony Stark's final line — that felt earned rather than imposed.
How Marvel Has Navigated Character Growth Before
The MCU's best case study in successful character evolution remains Steve Rogers. Captain America's journey from The First Avenger (2011) through Endgame (2019) tracked a character who changed dramatically in circumstance and emotional register while maintaining the core moral identity that defined him. The creative teams on those films understood that audiences would tolerate — even welcome — a character being broken, humbled, or tested, as long as the fundamental traits they recognized remained legible.
The same principle applied to Iron Man's arc. Tony Stark in Iron Man 3 (2013) was a character dealing with anxiety and PTSD, a significant departure from the swaggering figure of the first film. That choice polarized some viewers initially, but the long-term judgment of the film's audience improved as the arc resolved across subsequent entries. It demonstrated that short-term discomfort with character change could be rehabilitated by narrative payoff — but only when the underlying identity remained intact.
Where Marvel has stumbled, the pattern is instructive. Characters who felt repositioned for franchise logistics rather than organic storytelling reasons — repositioned to introduce new heroes, or to clear the board for the next phase — have tended to generate the most sustained audience skepticism. The lesson, drawn from years of fan discourse and box office pattern analysis, is that audiences are sophisticated enough to distinguish between a character who grows and a character who is simply being managed.
What This Means for Fans and the Franchise's Future
Russo's candor about the difficulty of this process is itself meaningful. Franchise filmmakers in the blockbuster ecosystem are not typically incentivized to discuss creative uncertainty in public. Acknowledging that something is "very difficult" is a departure from the promotional language of invulnerability that has historically surrounded MCU productions. It signals either genuine creative humility or a deliberate effort to recalibrate audience expectations — possibly both.
For fans invested in the characters built across the past 18 years, Russo's framing should function as reassurance, not alarm. The Russo Brothers demonstrated with Infinity War and Endgame that they understand the difference between narrative service and narrative disruption. They know that audiences aren't simply attached to superheroes in spandex — they're attached to specific emotional histories, to the accumulation of choices and losses and relationships that make fictional people feel real.
The hardest part of the job, as Russo describes it, is not writing action sequences or managing visual effects pipelines. It's holding the character steady at the center of all that pressure. It's resisting the temptation to rewrite beloved personalities for the sake of convenience, while simultaneously refusing to leave them frozen in amber when the story demands movement.
Whether Doomsday threads that needle will ultimately be decided by audiences in theaters. But the fact that Anthony Russo Marvel characters remain a serious creative preoccupation — not just a marketing talking point — suggests that the people behind the film understand what is actually at stake. In a franchise whose cultural dominance was built on audiences trusting that their investment would be honored, that's not a small thing.
Source: Variety
