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This Wasn’t the Plan
The sensational quality of Marvel’s SDCC surprises obscured certain less-rosy realities.
On Saturday, as culmination to Marvel’s packed San Diego Comic-Con panel announcing the studio’s upcoming slate of projects, veteran MCU hands Anthony and Joe Russo appeared onstage alongside a phalanx of sinister metal-mask-wearing, robed figures to ecstatic cheers and awed murmurs. The cosplay-attired masses inside SDCC’s cavernous Hall H went reliably apeshit, and the convention worked its magic as perhaps popular culture’s most impactful hive of buzz, generating headlines worldwide that the erstwhile Iron Man, 59, would be back on the opposite side of the superhuman moral divide to antagonize his former cinematic-universe friends in 2026’s Doomsday and its 2027 sequel, Avengers: Secret Wars. Co-directing Netflix’s Ryan Gosling–Chris Evans action flick, The Gray Man, and the opioid drama Cherry for Apple TV+ (neither of which generated positive reviews or much enthusiasm among streaming-service viewers), the brothers produced Everything Everywhere All at Once, which swept the 2023 Oscars winning Best Picture among other top trophies.
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