Anthony and Joe Russo directed Avengers: Endgame, which went on to be the highest-grossing film of all time. The Russo brothers have since produced Extraction, the most successful Netflix original movie, and have just broken yet another record for the highest budget for a Netflix movie with their new project, The Gray Man. But there’s one thing that would pull them back to Marvel.
Talking to Bro Bible, the Russos were questioned about earlier comments they’ve made about Secret Wars, an 80s comic run in which a cosmic entity transports many of Marvel’s heroes to the planet “Battleworld” to fight against various foes. According to Joe Russo, this comic was big for him as a child–and he’d love to help realize it on-screen.
“I read that when I was 10 or 11, and it was the scale of getting all of the heroes together,” Joe recalls. “It was one of the first major books to do that–that was really event-storytelling to me at its finest.” He also enjoyed that the heroes and villains had to team up at various points. “(Anthony) and I like complicated relationships between heroes and villains, we like villains who believe they’re heroes in their own stories,” he says.
“To execute something on the scale of Infinity War was directly related to the dream of Secret Wars, which is even larger in scale,” he continues.
Anthony is similarly enthusiastic about the idea. “It would be the biggest movie you could possibly imagine, so that’s what really excites us about the story,” he says. “The ambition of it is even bigger than the ambition of the Infinity Saga.”
Right now, the Marvel Cinematic Universe does not have a particularly strong list of (surviving) villains to pull from–although since the Disney buyout of Fox, X-Men and Fantastic Four villains can be called upon.
The next film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Black Widow. It’s currently scheduled to arrive in November, if cinemas can open by then.
