Ten writers have credit thus far on Avengers: Doomsday, including Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds. Let’s take a look…
Over the last few days, the Writers’ Guild of America website has uploaded the screenplay credits for the upcoming Marvel juggernaut Avengers: Doomsday. It’s a film where it’s been little secret it was in flux through its production, and also that it’s got to juggle an enormous number of characters too.
Marvel has pulled this off before of course, so we’re none the wiser if it’s managed to do so again. Furthermore, it’s not unusual that a large number of writers work on a film, and we only find out about a few of them.
What’s interesting here is how many are going to get some degree of credit, and also, the absence of ampersands.
An ampersand – & – tends to denote a writing team, but every name listed this far is an ‘and’. Implying that they worked separately from one another.
The headline writing credit has been awarded to Stephen McFeely and Michael Waldon. That’s fairly straightforward and not unexpected.
But there are further credits listed, for ‘additional literary material (not on-screen). McFeely and Waldron are listed again there, as are – deep breath – Eric Pearson, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Jeff Loveness, Andrew Lanham, Destin Daniel Cretton (the director of Spider-Man: Brand New Day of course), Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.
The headlines are being made by Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman being on the list, two names – with all due respect – that we don’t tend to associate with writing their films (although Reynolds has been credited for writing on the last two Deadpool pictures).
The official WGA definition for what determines an ‘additional literary material’ credit is “an official film credit introduced by the Writers Guild of America to recognize Guild-contracted writers who contributed writing services to a theatrical feature but did not qualify for a traditional primary writing credit.”
Thus, we can assume that Reynolds and Jackman wrote some dialogue for their characters, while Cretton was once upon a time set to direct the movie when it was centred around Jonathan Majors’ character of Kang.
Quite what everyone else contributed is unclear, and it’s also unclear what actual credits will make it to the screen in the end. But it’s a fair to assume that where Avengers: Doomsday is concerned, there are a fair few cooks at work…
The film arrives in December.