Jonathan Hickman has been reading Avengers: Doomsday scripts since early 2024. The writer behind the comics that Marvel Studios is adapting for its next two Avengers films revealed in an interview with Bleeding Cool, ahead of his first trip to Lucca Comics & Games in Italy, that he works as a consultant for the studio. “I consult for studios and read almost all the movies that they’re making,” Hickman said, adding that he has followed Doomsday through two and a half years of drafts. Reports on the interview from Nerdist and others say his input extends to Avengers: Secret Wars as well.
Hickman told Bleeding Cool he has not seen a final cut of Doomsday, only work in progress, and that watching scenes before the visual effects were added was a first for him. He also described a major shift in the project once Joe and Anthony Russo and writer Stephen McFeely returned and Robert Downey Jr. was announced as Doctor Doom.
He Wrote the Map Marvel Is Following
Kevin Feige has been open about where these movies come from. Speaking to EW after the first Doomsday footage played at CinemaCon, Feige said the story is drawn from a famous comic run in which universes are colliding and Earths run into each other. In a later interview with Chinese press, reported by ComicBookMovie, he named Time Runs Out and Secret Wars as the main storylines behind both films.
Both of those are Hickman’s. His Avengers and New Avengers run, which started with the Marvel NOW! relaunch in 2012, introduced the incursions, the collisions between Earths that end entire universes. New Avengers put the Illuminati (Iron Man, Reed Richards, Namor, Black Bolt, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Professor X, and for a while Captain America) in charge of the impossible choice of destroying other Earths to save their own. Time Runs Out closed that run, and the 2015 Secret Wars event ended it with Doctor Doom holding the remains of the multiverse together as the god-emperor of Battleworld. The MCU has been borrowing the incursion concept for the whole Multiverse Saga.
When Marvel needed someone who understands how those pieces fit, the man who designed them was the obvious call.
A Writer Who Plans the Ending First
Hickman’s real asset to this project is how he builds stories. Before his Avengers run launched, editor Tom Brevoort said Hickman’s outline for the main book was about 63 issues long, and Hickman described a structure linking Avengers and New Avengers years down the road. He plotted the ending before readers saw the first page.
That is the skill Doomsday and Secret Wars need most. The Multiverse Saga started without a fixed destination, lost its original villain when Marvel dropped Kang, and now has two films to land a story that has spread across movies and Disney+ series since 2021. A consultant who has already taken this exact premise from setup to conclusion, and who knows which beats carry the weight in the final act, can tell the filmmakers where the structure is load-bearing.
The timing makes it more interesting. If Hickman started reading scripts two and a half years ago, he was on the project in early 2024. Marvel did not announce the Russos’ return or Downey as Doom until San Diego Comic-Con that July. He was reading drafts on either side of the switch from The Kang Dynasty to Doomsday, and the switch moved the films closer to his own comics. Hickman has written Doom more than almost anyone in the last decade, from Secret Wars to the 2024 Doom one-shot with Sanford Greene, where Doom sets out to stop Galactus from ending the universe.
The Track Record at the Studio
This does not appear to be a one-off. Cosmic Book News points to Spider-Man: Long Way Home, the five-issue series Marvel announced in March from Hickman and Adam Kubert, which sends Spider-Man, the Punisher, and the Hulk after a missing Cosmic Cube. Spider-Man: Brand New Day put that same trio on screen in July. Hickman’s own claim that he reads almost every Marvel film in development suggests the studio treats him as a story resource across its slate, beyond the two Avengers films.
What It Means for December
A consultant does not write the movie. The Russos and McFeely are telling this story, and Hickman’s role is to read and give notes. Nerdist made the point that Marvel picking his brain is a better use of him than lifting his panels wholesale, and the films will have to do plenty his comics never did. Feige has described the colliding Earths as a way to bring casts from different franchises together, with the original X-Men, the original Avengers, the newer Avengers, and the Fantastic Four all in play. Hickman’s comics were never built to serve more than two decades of movie continuity.
His record also has misses. Cosmic Book News reports that his recent cosmic line relaunch at Marvel was cut short, so his name is not a guarantee of anything.
Still, the biggest risk for Doomsday and Secret Wars was always mechanical. Multiverse stories fall apart when the rules shift to suit the next set piece, and the MCU has had trouble keeping its multiverse rules consistent. The person who wrote the most coherent version of this story has been checking the scripts for over two years, and he says the filmmakers have treated him well. For fans who have been waiting since 2015 to see Battleworld on screen, that is the most encouraging Avengers news in a long time.
Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, 2026. Avengers: Secret Wars follows on December 17, 2027.
Sources: Bleeding Cool, Cosmic Book News, Nerdist, Den of Geek, ComicBookMovie, The Playlist, SuperHeroHype
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