Avengers director Joe Russo: ‘Spoiler culture can be over-policed’

When it comes to movie spoilers, the team behind Marvel’s Avengers series are probably most aware of the responsibility it carries.

You can only imagine the chaos behind the scenes when Mark Ruffalo accidentally leaked key details about Infinity War.

Director Joe Russo and writer-producer Angela Russo-Otstot have the privilege – but also the burden – of being in the elite club of holding the Marvel scripts before anyone else.

The pair, unsurprisingly, say it can add a lot of pressure, with Joe acknowledging that spoiler culture can ‘become a little over-policed’.

And they would know as, among the slew of productions from the Russos’ studio AGBO, is one of 2026’s most anticipated cinematic releases, Avengers: Doomsday.

It marks Joe and older brother Anthony’s return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe after seven years and is being filmed back-to-back with its sequel Avengers: Secret Wars, just as the Russos last did with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

Despite the hype around Doomsday, which is a direct follow-up to Endgame and considered a cornerstone of the MCU’s multiverse saga, the team already managed to pull off two major announcements without compromise: the surprise return of Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom – revealed onstage at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2024 – and the five-and-a-half-hour stream unveiling the rest of the movie’s heavyweight cast, including the reappearance of Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans as well as X-Men mutant cast members such as Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen.

With cameras still rolling at Pinewood Studios, there remains every opportunity for leaks from the set and it’s a whole extra responsibility they take ‘incredibly seriously’, says Angela, who is also the current Chief Creative Officer of AGBO.

‘We spend a lot of time thinking about the audience. We even come at the different stories and initial concepts that we want to build from that very headspace of us being the audience and what was it that we responded to as children, what do we respond to right now?’ she tells Metro at the Sands International Film Festival.

‘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.’

It’s a balance too between making sure to ‘honour the integrity of that IP’ and also ‘surprise and delight’ the fans of it by bringing them something unexpected.

‘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.’

Joe echoes his sister’s points while admitting that spoiler culture ‘is a tricky one’.

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

Our conversation comes not long after the release of Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s new A24 film The Drama, which kept under wraps the nature of its plot twist (and driver) and sparked criticism for its rom-com adjacent publicity – especially in the US, where the school shooting narrative struck close to home.

When it comes to Avengers films, it’s about ‘protecting the emotional experience of the story’, first and foremost.

You can’t control everything. You have to focus on making something that holds up beyond the initial surprise – Joe Russo

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

The emotional experience is certainly helped by a concurrent international release, more of a rarity in the world of movie streaming and television binge-watching, rather than people sitting down to watch and talk about something each week ‘at the exact same time’.

‘We don’t live in that world anymore,’ adds Angela. ‘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?’

But with Avengers releases there’s excitement for AGBO around creating an opportunity again on a global scale for everybody, in a cinema, to ‘enjoy that experience and discovery simultaneously, and then talk about it, simultaneously’.

That’s if you can stay off the likes of X and TikTok during opening weekend if you’re not at those midnight screenings leading into December 18, of course.

Logistically, getting all the fans there with a clean, spoiler-free slate is a massive undertaking – and this is the first time AGBO has been involved in it; Angela says they have ‘enormous respect’ for Marvel’s industry-setting standards previously.

‘So many of the things that we aspire to do are really us taking lessons from them. I take spoilers around those films incredibly seriously because I never would want anything to be coming on our end,’ she adds.

Marvel famously weathered a spoiler storm ahead of Avengers Assemble’s release in 2012, when Samuel L. Jackson’s script was accidentally printed out twice, with the duplicate copy left by the printer. An opportunistic assistant sold it online, and Marvel then travelled to Canada, where the actor was filming, to work out what had happened.

‘They found out who it was, dude quit, left the country. They set up a fake buy for the script, dude didn’t show up. It was crazy,’ the Pulp Fiction star told Entertainment Weekly in 2023.

From then, no script print-outs – and Jackson’s Secret Invasion co-star Emilia Clarke even revealed that Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss looked to Marvel to copy tighter security protocols in the final seasons [‘They were like, “Marvel. We’re just learning from Marvel. Whatever Marvel’s doing, we just want to do that.”’].

AGBO, which previously also produced Netflix’s The Electric State and the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once, has learned from that too.

There are also some people [at AGBO] that should know that just don’t want to know! – Angela Russo-Otstot

‘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,’ laughs Angela. ‘We may think we know things and we’re wrong!’

It’s also, of course, kept to a need-to-know basis as well.

‘And it’s funny because there are also some people that should know that just don’t want to know. They’re like, “No thank you. I’d rather stay in the dark!”’ Angela shares.

It’s also perhaps helpful that two of the MCU’s most renowned spoiler-happy actors Tom Holland and Mark Ruffalo aren’t thought to be involved with Doomsday.

It’s been a year since last speaking to the Russos at Sands, the festival which AGBO co-founded as a major sponsor with the University of St Andrews after Joe’s daughter attended as a student.

Last year Joe’s time was limited in Scotland due to Avengers production duties with Anthony and this year is the same, with him eventually having to skip attending in person altogether just days after appearing with Downey Jr. and Evans at Las Vegas’s CinemaCon to show the audience in the room an early look at the first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday.

So, what’s it like having one giant project eat up so much time, and does it feel like a lot has been achieved in the past 12 months?

‘Those kinds of projects are all-consuming; there’s no way around it. When you’re working at that scale, it takes everything,’ says Joe.

‘But we’ve built AGBO in a way that allows us to keep multiple things moving at once, with a strong team around us. It’s always a balance between being deep in the work creatively and still having a broader perspective on what we’re building as a company.’

Angela steers the AGBO ship as Joe and Anthony work on Doomsday followed by Secret Wars.

‘It’s intense and something that I try very hard to give them space to keep all of their focus on. My job is to take care of the rest so that they can give every ounce of their creativity and collaboration to that effort, with the Marvel team.’

The time difference, she admits, also ‘makes it hard sometimes’, with AGBO based in Los Angeles.

‘But I would say that it’s been pretty seamless thus far and really exciting to see them diving back in with Kevin [Feige, President of Marvel Studios] and everybody.’

AGBO is also offering creative services on the movies through visualisation, a digital way of story boarding that can include both sets and motion capture to build a full animatic of a scene – particularly helpful where ‘so much of it is fantastical and not present on the actual set’ when filming.

My job is to take care of the rest so that they can give every ounce of their creativity and collaboration to Marvel – Angela Russo-Otstot

In 2026, AGBO also has a record-breaking year with more films and series being released than ever before, and a team now of over 100.

It’s currently overseeing productions shooting in Morocco, Indonesia, South Korea, Ireland, New Jersey and Thailand, alongside London, with Citadel season 2 hitting Prime Video on May 6 and pirate movie The Bluff – starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Karl Urban – the number one film on the platform when it was released in February.

‘Looking back, it’s been a very productive year with five different projects in production all over the world and two global releases with many, many more to come this year,’ adds Joe.

But while ABGO’s production outlook is ambitiously large and growing, Sands Film Festival remains deliberately smaller scale, cultivating a local audience, allowing student curators and rejecting the element of competition seen in the biggest festivals like Cannes, Toronto and Venice.

However, it’s still attracted world class talent such as Tom Holland, Stanley Tucci and Dame Joanna Lumley to take part in past events.

‘Half of new ventures don’t make it to five years. I won’t pretend that it’s always been easy. But something extraordinary would happen every year at this festival,’ Festival Director Ania Trzebiatowska noted in her opening night speech at this year’s edition.

‘The goal from the beginning was to build something that felt personal,’ says Joe. ‘We wanted a space where filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and below the line could connect with audiences and with each other in a meaningful way. That intimacy was the point. At the same time, we believed you could bring world-class talent into that environment if the experience was genuine.’

Joe’s plans for the future include hoping for further growth in impact – but without losing Sands’ core identity.

‘If we can keep supporting new voices, deepen the connection with the university, and build a stronger global reputation while still feeling like a close community, then we’re doing it right.’

Avengers: Doomsday is set for release on December 18, 2026, with Avengers: Secret Wars due to follow on December 17, 2027. The Sands International Film Festival 2026 ran from April 17-19 in St Andrews, Scotland. It will return in 2027.

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