Joe Russo Says Doomsday Spoilers Are ‘Over-Policed’

Joe Russo has a message for everyone anxiously guarding their timelines ahead of Avengers: Doomsday: maybe breathe a little. In a new interview with Metro UK, the co-director of the most anticipated superhero film in years opened up about his evolving relationship with spoiler culture — and it turns out the man who once begged the internet to keep Thanos’s secrets isn’t quite so precious about it anymore.

“On one hand, audiences want to be surprised, and that’s part of what makes the theatrical experience exciting,” Russo told Metro. “On the other hand, it can become a little over-policed, where people are anxious about engaging with anything.”

“We design these films to unfold in a certain way, and we want audiences to feel those moments as intended. But at the same time, you can’t control everything. You have to focus on making something that holds up beyond the initial surprise.”

That last line is the real tell. For Russo, the goal has shifted — or at least matured. A great film shouldn’t live or die by whether you knew the twist coming in. It should be good enough to survive the spoiler.

A Long Way From #ThanosDemandsYourSilence

It wasn’t so long ago that the Russo brothers were doing the exact opposite of shrugging. Back in April 2018, weeks before Avengers: Infinity War opened, Joe and Anthony published an open letter to fans with a #ThanosDemandsYourSilence hashtag asking people to protect the film’s biggest moments. They did it again a year later with #DontSpoilTheEndgame ahead of Avengers: Endgame. Those campaigns became part of Marvel’s cultural mythology — a signal of just how high the stakes felt at the time.

But that was a different era. Infinity War and Endgame were genuine cultural events in a way that’s become increasingly rare. Their trailers even included deliberately misleading shots designed to throw fans off the scent. The bar for that kind of secrecy was extraordinarily high — and maintaining it required an almost military-grade operation.

The approach to Doomsday has already looked different. Marvel rolled out its enormous cast reveal via a directors’ chairs livestream — a five-and-a-half-hour announcement event that confirmed dozens of names who could have easily been kept as surprises. Four teaser trailers have already dropped. Promotional art featuring characters like Doctor Doom has leaked. Costume images have surfaced. The studio seems to be getting ahead of the information, rather than trying to plug every hole.

Whether that’s strategy or acceptance is probably a bit of both.

Inside AGBO, Things Are Still Very Much on Lockdown

While Joe’s public stance is relaxed, the operation behind the scenes tells a slightly different story. Angela Russo-Otstot — the Russos’ sister and Chief Creative Officer of their production company AGBO, which is co-producing both Doomsday and Secret Wars — made clear that protecting the experience still matters deeply to the team.

“We go to great lengths to plot out the most exciting way to reveal certain aspects, especially when you’re working with a known IP that people have such strong connections to and may have expectations around,” she said. “And so, a lot of thought goes into those twists and turns and reveals when it comes to not spoiling it for others. We’re big believers in that and protecting the sanctity of the experience for everybody to enjoy it in the same way.”

She also gave a peek behind the curtain at just how compartmentalized things are internally: “There’s some serious lockdown at our company. And it’s a very limited group that are across the different things that Anthony and Joe are aware of. We may think we know things and we’re wrong!”

That last detail is quietly fascinating — even people inside AGBO may be working with incomplete information. It’s the kind of thing Marvel has done before, feeding different departments different versions of a script to track leaks. Old habits, it seems, die hard.

Russo-Otstot also acknowledged the reality of the modern media landscape with a pragmatism that felt genuinely earned: “We don’t live in that world anymore. There’s far more choice of when you want to engage with something, how soon. There’s so many things going on, how quickly can you get to it?”

What’s Actually at Stake With Doomsday

The reason spoilers feel so loaded for this particular film is the sheer scale of what Marvel is attempting. Avengers: Doomsday isn’t just the first Avengers movie in seven years — it’s a multiverse collision that brings back characters fans thought they’d seen the last of, and introduces others who exist entirely outside the MCU’s established continuity.

The confirmed cast is genuinely staggering: Robert Downey Jr. returning as Victor von Doom/Doctor Doom, Chris Evans back as Steve Rogers, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Anthony Mackie as Captain America, Sebastian Stan, Paul Rudd, Tom Hiddleston, Letitia Wright, Florence Pugh, and Winston Duke on the MCU side. The Fantastic Four’s Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Joseph Quinn join them. And then there are the X-Men — Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Ian McKellen as Magneto, Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler, Rebecca Romijn, James Marsden, and Channing Tatum, reprising roles from Fox’s pre-Disney franchise for the first time within the MCU proper.

That’s a lot of reunions. A lot of moments fans have been waiting years — in some cases, decades — to see. Which is exactly why the spoiler stakes feel so high, even if the director himself is telling everyone to calm down.

Marvel is also planning to re-release Avengers: Endgame in theaters in September in an “Infinity Vision” format, reportedly with new footage designed to bridge the gap between that film and Doomsday. It’s another sign that the studio is leaning into the event-movie energy rather than trying to contain it.

Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, 2026. Avengers: Secret Wars follows on December 17, 2027. Whether the internet manages to stay quiet between now and then is, as Joe Russo might say, entirely out of anyone’s hands.