Marvel News: Russo Bros. in Talks to Direct Next Two ‘Avengers’ Movies

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Joe and Anthony Russo are assembling a team — once again.

The Russo Bros. are in early talks to return to Marvel Studios to direct not just one, but the next two Avengers movies, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.

The hiring ends a months-long, high stakes search by the studio for filmmakers to oversee the fifth and sixth Avengers movies. Multiple names were in contention, including Deadpool & Wolverine director Shawn Levy, who was offered the gig. Sources say the talks are in the early stages.

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The fifth Avengers movie was previously titled Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, and was to star Jonathan Majors as time-traveling villain Kang. But Marvel cut ties with the actor after he was convicted of assault in harassment in December. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton was once attached to direct Kang Dynasty, but he departed a month before Majors’ conviction. The feature is expected to get a new name and a new focus.

The sixth Avengers film is Secret Wars, which is a storyline the Russos have long talked about wanting to adapt. A pair of 1980s comic book series focused on an all powerful antagonist known as the Beyonder, who in the first installment pitted Marvel’s heroes and villains against each other on a planet known as Battleworld. A 2015 revival served as the climax to writer Jonathan Hickman’s own multiverse saga, which has already had elements referenced in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). In Hickman’s Secret Wars, all of Marvel’s multiverses are destroyed, with remnants surviving on a single planet ruled by the villain Doctor Doom.

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