Avengers: Doomsday Reportedly a Mess in the Edit as a Source Claims There Is Friction in the Editing Room

In July 2026, reports surfaced that Avengers: Doomsday was not in great shape in the edit, with one source describing friction in the editing room as the Russo brothers worked to assemble the film. The reports arrived alongside news that the final runtime was 2 hours and 45 minutes, and what we were hearing was that the film was a mess.

I want to go through exactly where this came from and the wording the sources used, because I think the wording matters. I also want to look at what may really have been going on with a film that once seemed ambitious and was proving to be exactly that once it reached the editing table.

John Campea first heard Avengers: Doomsday was struggling in the edit

The first rumblings came the week before, when John Campea said he was hearing that something was not all good with Avengers: Doomsday. According to what he heard, the filmmakers believed they had nailed the movie during principal photography and pickup photography. Once they were on the editing table, though, they were struggling to find the film, as he put it. The magic they thought they were capturing during the original filming simply was not there in the editing room.

Less than a day later, Campea followed that up. He said a different source of his had replied to him about the report and said that was not what he had heard.

World of Reel's source says there is friction, but the December 18 date is safe

That brings us to the article from World of Reel, which ran under the headline Marvel's Avengers Doomsday reportedly a mess in the edit after shooting without a finished script and packing in 60 plus roles. The writer explained that a few months earlier, a top source of theirs, the same one who told them the Blade movie had been scrapped, had said Avengers: Doomsday was a mess. According to the piece, that had led many people internally at Marvel to wonder whether the film could make its intended December 18, 2026 release date.

That same source reportedly reached out again after Campea's report on his podcast, which said editors were struggling to assemble the film and that directors Joe and Anthony Russo were not finding the movie in the edit. The article put it this way: "My source tells me that there is indeed friction in the editing room."

The news did not end on such a bad note, however. The source reportedly finished by saying they would figure it out and that any doubt about making the December 18 release date had evaporated. As of July 2026, Marvel was said to be bullish on the date despite Dune: Part Three opening on the same day.

Neither Campea's report nor this article was quite enough for me to panic at that point, although the article did indicate that maybe things were not going as well as planned.

Doomsday's unfinished script echoes Marvel's Multiverse Saga missteps

One thing we do know for sure, because it was confirmed by people filming Avengers: Doomsday, is that the script was not done when principal photography started. If we have learned anything from the missteps Marvel Studios made during the Multiverse Saga, it is that when they did not have finished scripts, or felt the need to continuously rewrite films like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, it made for messy edits in what otherwise could have been good films.

It is actually a testament to the writers on those films, Michael Waldron and Jeff Loveness, the two writers who were initially tapped to write Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars, that their stories made it through that much watering down. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness reportedly went through about 20 to 21 different rewrites, and it still was a very decent movie. But neither that film nor Quantumania was as good as it could have been, as they probably were at some point before the entire Marvel process got in the way.

Marvel Studios and Kevin Feige refer to this process as plussing, but only so many writers and directors truly know how to work within it and still produce an amazing film. The Russos pulled it off with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. If those two are struggling again here, then that just tells me that "if they couldn't do it, maybe nobody could."

Too many pressures stacked on Avengers: Doomsday at once

That brings us back to what the article argued, in its opinion, was the main problem, and I think it is probably the truth. It is not just having an unfinished script. It is not just having a lot of people on set who did not write the original script, trying to rewrite the movie while shooting it. It is not just having what is probably the most ambitious superhero ensemble ever put together for one movie.

It is also not just introducing a major villain in Doctor Doom, who has been cast with the actor so familiar for playing the most famous hero in the MCU. Nor is it only that the filmmakers were trying to live up to Infinity War and Endgame while also trying to make something drastically different and avoid repeating those two films. Crafting their art in a way that specifically avoids art they have already made could lead to a messier film than it needed to be.

When you add all of those factors together and multiply them by the pressure of sticking the landing so Doomsday is a great run up to Avengers: Secret Wars, that is probably where the friction comes in. If the first one does not land, I believe "it's definitely going to negatively impact Secret Wars." This film would be difficult to make in postproduction even if everything went as smoothly as hoped and principal photography really captured the story they were trying to tell. There are a lot of people working through the edit trying to figure out the best cut of the film, with a deadline that, as of July 2026, was about half a year away. The fact that they reportedly did not get exactly what they needed could truly make for some friction.

Weighing who the Doomsday sources are, and the earlier praise

You have to consider who these sources are, what they are saying and what they are being told, and whether it is the opinion of one or two people or of a lot of people behind the scenes. It seems like the same thing has happened with every Marvel movie during the Multiverse Saga. Whether it is a huge mainstream Hollywood outlet running a hit piece weeks before a release, or someone who claims to have seen a test screening trashing a movie that cannot defend itself, it always seems like there are major detractors who want to bring up drama behind the scenes to drum up negative conversation before a film reaches theaters.

Sometimes some of it can be true. But some friction behind the scenes on a movie this big, having a hard time here and there editing a movie that seems like it would be impossible to edit in the first place, does not necessarily mean that there is really anything to it.

To be fair, earlier in 2026 there were reactions to the very first internal Avengers: Doomsday screenings at Marvel, and it was said that the top brass were praising it as one of the best Marvel films ever. That does not mean a lot, because we have heard plenty of executive speak at the top of these studios promising this or that about an upcoming film. Sometimes it tracks and sometimes it is complete nonsense. Still, there were at least some positive things said, so you have to take both sides.

Avengers: Secret Wars depends on Doomsday landing with fans

You do not need this kind of news to know they had their work cut out for them, and I think there is a factual conversation to be had about what happens to Avengers: Secret Wars if Doomsday does not do well. By every metric, Avengers: Doomsday had been tracking as the number one movie of the year as of July 2026, ahead of Dune, ahead of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, ahead of The Odyssey, ahead of them all.

At the time I was really eager to see The Odyssey myself. I rather liked Oppenheimer. There was obviously some real negative discourse surrounding The Odyssey at the time over some choices Christopher Nolan made. But I did not think The Odyssey, Spider-Man, the two of them arriving close together, or a rerelease of Avengers: Endgame with new material would match the fanfare and hype I expected for Doomsday. People will go, and there will be a huge box office.

What matters more than the box office for the first two or three weeks is what the fandom thinks and says a month or two after release. If the movie does it right and the buzz is hot, Marvel is back and heading into an even bigger event to close out a Multiverse Saga that has not been perfect. But if Doomsday misses a beat, if they truly cannot find the edit and deliver a messy film of almost three hours struggling to develop Doctor Doom, sell the plot and reconcile all of the characters and dialogue into something meaningful, that would be a bummer for Doomsday even with the numbers there, and a super bummer for Secret Wars, no matter what happens on Disney Plus in between.

There are no other Marvel movies between them and no other opportunity to get the hype back. As I put it, "Doomsday has to land in order for Avengers Secret Wars to be even bigger." Not at the box office, but with the fans. The critics can hate it, but if fans like me love it, that is enough to carry it. With Marvel casting the X-Men and looking toward the Mutant Saga, they cannot afford for Doomsday to be a bloated, messy installment. If Marvel blemishes this, I am not sure what Secret Wars looks like, or how the fandom will feel going into it the following year.

Do you buy into these reports of friction in the Avengers: Doomsday editing room at all?