‘Avengers: Secret Wars’ To Be Written by Michael Waldron
Loki season 1 showrunner and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness writer Michael Waldron has been tapped to write the upcoming event film Avengers: Secret Wars, according to a new report from Deadline.
The movie will cap off the second saga in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, aptly titled the Multiverse Saga, as Kevin Feige explained over the summer at San Diego Comic-Con. It is currently scheduled to come out six months after Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, which will be this saga’s Infinity War, i.e., the first entry of a two-part event that will conclude this storyline. While there’s been some movement on The Kang Dynasty, with Marvel confirming Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton as the captain behind the camera in that movie, and recent reports saying Jeff Loveness will be writing the movie, Secret Wars has been mostly silent.
Well, not quite, actually. A couple of weeks ago, a rumor from The Weekly Planet Podcast (via Murphy’s Multiverse) started circulating online saying that Black Panther director Ryan Coogler is in line to direct the movie, though no major Hollywood trade has backed that yet. With Coogler rolling out the Black Panther sequel in just over a month, it is highly likely we’ll get an update on that, especially as the studio gears up for pre-production on both Avengers movies. We do know that they will be directed by two different people, though both filmmakers will be working together to deliver the most cohesive experience possible. They are scheduled for a May and November 2025 release window, but that may change. While that sounds quite far off, notice that the first movie will probably have to start shooting by the end of next year given the current climate with VFX houses. A year of pre-production sounds about right for two massive projects like these — also, Marvel is surely already ringing most of their actors to let them know they should keep a wide opening in their schedules for late 2023 and early 2024.
Michael Waldron was hired as the main writer on Loki season 1 after his work on Rick & Morty (a series Kevin Feige is a self-professed fan of). That show not only (semi-)introduced us to the main villain of the new saga in Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror/He Who Remains, but also opened up the can of the multiverse and set in motion the main plot of the new saga. That was later continued to great detail in Multiverse of Madness, so it’s only appropriate that, if Secret Wars is the movie to close up the multiverse, it will be Waldron who does it. After all, it was him who opened it in the first place.
According to Deadline‘s report, a lot of writers were considered for the role, but Marvel execs have a lot of trust in the writer, and he was easily the frontrunner for the job. After all, Loki still remains the most popular Marvel Studios series on Disney Plus, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness almost crossed the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office earlier this summer, becoming the second highest grossing movie of Phase 4 after Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Waldron said shortly after the release of the Doctor Strange sequel that he was hard at work writing a new Star Wars movie that Kevin Feige would be producing. If he was really campaigning for the Avengers: Secret Wars gig, it’s likely that movie has been pushed further down the development schedule line for Lucasfilm.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
