Robert Downey Jr. on Avengers: Doomsday: ‘We’ve laboured long and hard’ to avoid the post-Endgame curse

As Avengers: Doomsday approaches its December release, Robert Downey Jr. and director Joe Russo have been candid about the shadow cast by Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, and what it will take for the new film to avoid feeling like a step down.

Speaking with CBR, Russo admitted that making a film on the scale of Infinity War was punishing, describing the process to filmmaker Steven Soderbergh as grueling work spent over two and a half years trying to keep the sprawling ensemble cast satisfied with their arcs. Despite the difficulty, Downey Jr. called Infinity War the most significant film the franchise has produced, noting that audiences tend to associate it with specific personal memories, where they were in life when they saw it.

“It’s not even about how I executed it,” he said. “It’s about the way it’s been structured and the other characters. There’s something going on in Doomsday and forward that is literally the only antidote to ‘How do you not have these films be a letdown after an Infinity War and Endgame?’ And boy, have we laboured long and hard to bring that," he explained.

That legacy is part of what makes Doomsday a tricky proposition. Downey Jr., who now plays the villainous Doctor Doom, suggested the challenge isn't really about his performance but about how the story itself is built, saying the film's structure is designed as "the only antidote" to being an inevitable letdown after Infinity War and Endgame.

Russo echoed that sentiment, pointing to emotional depth rather than raw spectacle as the key to keeping the franchise fresh, arguing that complexity is what makes a story land more fully with audiences, and that Doomsday leans further into that than any Avengers film before it.

Russo added, “The stakes keep going up. But emotional complexity is always the answer. You bring emotional complexity to anything, and it enriches it and makes it a fuller experience for the audience. It surprises you. There are a lot of surprises in this, and I think it’s the most emotionally complex of all of them. In a lot of ways, the most mature of all of them.”

Marvel has had a mixed run since Endgame, spreading its output across theatrical films and Disney+ series with uneven results — though Downey Jr. has said projects like WandaVision helped him stay tied to the character during the pandemic. With recent box-office wins from Deadpool & Wolverine and Spider-Man: Brand New Day behind it, the studio now heads into Doomsday with more momentum than it's had in years — though whether the film escapes comparison to its predecessors remains to be seen.