Spider-Man Writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers Join the Avengers Doomsday and Secret Wars Scripts

I wasn't totally surprised to see today's headline. At first I was alarmed, but at the end of the day this is Marvel Studios doing exactly what it has always done, for better or for worse.

Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers Move From Spider-Man Brand New Day to the Avengers Scripts

The news broke from The Wrap under the headline that Spider-Man Brand New Day writers are working on Marvel's Avengers movies. Avengers Doomsday is out this December, and Avengers Secret Wars is out next Christmas.

The Wrap reports that earlier in the week they spoke to Destin Daniel Cretton, the director of Spider-Man Brand New Day, who let it slip that Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers left that production to work on Avengers Doomsday and Avengers Secret Wars.

The outlet then caught up with McKenna and Sommers on Thursday, who confirmed that yes, they are working on the new movies, and that was all they could say. "We are happy to be involved with the Avengers. We can't really say much more than that," Sommers said. "We love working with Marvel, and we have a relationship with the Russos. It's a pleasure. It's a real pleasure."

Tracing Every Writer Who Has Touched the Avengers Doomsday and Secret Wars Scripts

For anyone who needs a refresher on how these scripts got here, it originally was Jeff Loveness writing Kang Dynasty and Michael Waldron writing Avengers Secret Wars. Then it turned into Stephen McFeely, one half of the duo that wrote Infinity War and Avengers Endgame, once the Russos boarded the project. Later, Michael Waldron was brought back on to help finish the script.

Now we're finding out that McKenna and Sommers, the two guys who have worked on the Spider-Man movies pretty much since they started at the MCU, were also brought in and are still currently working on those scripts. So now there are at least two writers and a writing duo directly involved with the Avengers Doomsday and Avengers Secret Wars scripts.

Why More Writers Worries Me: Blade, X-Men and the Too Many Cooks Problem

This is where at first I was a bit alarmed. The problem with Marvel Studios has always been that it cannot settle on one version of a script and continually passes that script around to different writers to keep working on it. Blade had somewhere in the vicinity of five writers. We know the X-Men script is already going under a rewrite. So many writers on the same project without an original voice can lead to a disconnect, a watering down of the original idea.

Xochitl Gomez came out on social media defending Multiverse of Madness, saying it had something like 20 or 21 rewrites, which is a testament to how good Michael Waldron's story was in the first place that it even survived that many rewrites. In the case of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, written by Jeff Loveness, by the time that movie was cut and the finished product was on the floor, it turned out to be a mess, specifically because it was a movie by committee. Too many cooks in the kitchen.

So when I hear that the two guys who work on the Spider-Man movies are brought in for Avengers Doomsday and Avengers Secret Wars, at first I'm alarmed, thinking the scripts really needed another set of writers. Then I thought to myself, yeah, this is about par for the course because Marvel just can't help themselves. Considering how good Spider-Man: Brand New Day truly was, maybe their direct involvement is a good thing, but more isn't always better, and I think it's fair to be a little wary, because if the script was absolutely airtight, they wouldn't need additional writers to help it along.

Tying This Back to Last Month's Rumors About the Doomsday Edit

I want to tie this back to rumors we were hearing last month from industry insiders, even fellow YouTubers, about there being something missing in the edit of Avengers: Doomsday. The scoop, coming from multiple sources, was that while they were shooting Doomsday, they felt like the movie they were shooting was awesome and that they were getting everything they needed in the frame. But when it got to the editing floor and they started going through the principal photography, the pickup shots and the reshoots, they were having a hard time finding the movie they thought they were making.

Destin Daniel Cretton admitting that McKenna and Sommers left Spider-Man: Brand New Day actively to start working on Doomsday puts that timetable clearly last year, not in the more recent timetable where this editing problem is said to have occurred. Still, you have to wonder how many rewrites to an original script, or starting to film without a finished script, may be leading to problems.

I want to make it exactly clear, I'm not saying they were brought in to fix these recent editing problems. I'm saying the opposite. Given the timetable, they probably started working on it last year, which means two writers were already working on the script, plus a writing duo, plus whomever else in the executive producer role is adding their notes, and now we're hearing maybe there are some problems in editing getting this thing to be the movie they hope it is.

The Risk: Threads That Don't Tie Up, Like Quantumania and Multiverse of Madness

That's why, if we run into huge problems with Avengers: Doomsday or Avengers: Secret Wars being plagued by some of the same problems we saw in multiverse movies like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Multiverse of Madness, it would show. In those films you can tell there was an original idea, but threads start to not get tied up because the storyline changes through Act Two and Act Three, and the intention of the dialogue and actions in Act One don't connect.

There's literally a phrase in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania about a word being our bond, where we never heard the original conversation it was supposed to call back to. These are the problems you run into when your script is not airtight.

Why the Doomsday and Secret Wars Timeline Leaves No Room for a Do-Over

Normally in Hollywood, and in art in general, you have the script first and then you make the movie. But in the case of Marvel Studios and Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars, pivoting off Kang Dynasty and the original Secret Wars announcement, they were working under a very strict timeline to wrap up the multiverse saga no matter where they were. They gave themselves more than enough time to shoot these movies, but if the script wasn't done in the first place, it doesn't matter how much time you leave it.

Plenty have speculated that Secret Wars and Doomsday could never hit their original dates. It looks like, barring some catastrophe, Doomsday is definitely going forward this December, and I have to assume the same with Secret Wars. The 2028 schedule is already locked up with three Marvel movies, Black Panther 3, Ghost Rider and the X-Men reboot. They can't move Secret Wars. Well, they could, but they're not going to.

Marvel is now under the gun to get these movies made, and you have to hope that bringing in these two pairs of writers at the eleventh hour, given they were already shooting principal photography last year, means they won't need any more rewrites at this point. Going forward into Secret Wars, which was supposed to start shooting already but hasn't, I wonder if that isn't a sign the script wasn't done. You hope that script has gotten across the finish line as well.

Marvel Will Have Only Themselves to Blame if This Goes Wrong

Marvel will only have themselves to blame if this is what leads to problems with these films, because it's a lesson that could have been learned. They've stubbed their toe on this before with not having scripts ready. It's not some big mystery in Hollywood that if your script isn't ready, sometimes the movie is going to fail, and there's no better evidence of this than Taika Waititi showing up with a loose draft of a script for Thor: Love and Thunder, a movie that has no sense of itself at all.

Is this reason to sound the alarm, or could more genuinely be better this time given how solid these writers are and how well they understand Marvel's nuance?