It’s not secret how much Joe and Anthony Russo would like to make Avengers: Secret Wars.
However, with today’s announcement at Comic-Con that that Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2025 will end with Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars, the comic studio’s Marvel Studios President said that the brothers aren’t attached to take the helm of either movie. The duo are responsible for delivering two of the top five grossing movies of all-time with 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War and 2019’s Avengers: Endgame which combined grossed $4.8 billion.
“They’re not connected to it,” Feige told us about the Russos and the Phase Avengers films. “They’ve been very direct about that. We love them, they love us. We want to find something to do together, it’s not this.”
Outside of Feige, we’ve heard there’s been no talks between the Russos and Marvel on the new Avengers films. We also hear that the Russos can’t commit to the new Avengers movies because they have three feature projects lined up with AGBO. Their Gray Man hit Netflix yesterday.
Kevin Feige reveals the Russo brothers are not directing the next ‘Avengers’ movies #SDCC pic.twitter.com/ivfoQdAlCk
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) July 24, 2022
Back at the world premiere for Gray Man two weeks ago, co-director Joe Russo told Deadline, “Our love for Marvel is based on the books that we read as kids, the books that we fell in love with. The one series that we adored growing up was Secret Wars. It’s incredibly ambitious. It would be bigger than Infinity War and Endgame. But it’s a massive undertaking. Those two movies were very hard to make. So trying to imagine making another two movies even bigger than those two? We’re going to have to sleep on that.”
Secret Wars was a a 12-issue limited series published from May 1984 to April 1985. However, there’s also a 2015 version written by Jonathan Hickman and drawn by Esad Ribić, the latter dealing with the destruction of the Marvel universe and other alternate universes with each universe’s respective Earth combining with each other into Battleworld, a planet that exhibits the aspects of the various universes.
Deadline also asked Feige to describe how Phase 4,5, and 6 differ thematically.
“We don’t like taking about the thematics of each phase until after we released everything. Because the truth is all of stories are both interconnected and hopefully stand apart. It’s only now even that we see what the thematics of one, two and three are. We have various ideas as we head into them. But the specifics we like to be uncovered project by project,” added Feige.
Kevin Feige on the difference between #Marvel Phase 4,5, and 6 thematically #SDCC 2022 pic.twitter.com/RwrI0IqlgE
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) July 24, 2022