Avengers: Secret Wars has barely begun filming at Pinewood Studios, and the entire crew is already on a five-week break. The report comes from Filmbase, a UK industry site that tracks crew alerts and job listings for freelancers working in British film and television. Its August 12 industry update lists the Russo brothers’ next Avengers film under productions already in prep, noting a five-week hiatus for all crew with work resuming at the end of September.
Filmbase builds its updates from conversations with working crew rather than official studio statements, so the report counts as a well-sourced industry account rather than a confirmed announcement from Marvel. No studio has commented on the pause or its cause.
Secret Wars closes out Marvel’s Multiverse Saga alongside its direct predecessor, Avengers: Doomsday, arriving in theaters December 18, 2026. Both films reunite Joe and Anthony Russo, the directing team behind Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, working from a script by longtime collaborator Stephen McFeely. Robert Downey Jr. anchors both films as Victor von Doom, a role Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has described as Downey’s version of Thanos for this saga, a shift from his original run as Tony Stark and Iron Man that ended in Endgame. The ensemble draws from across Marvel’s recent output: Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, Anthony Mackie’s Captain America, the Fantastic Four cast from this year’s First Steps, and the X-Men lineup assembled from the 2000s Fox films, including Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, and Rebecca Romijn reprising their original roles. Secret Wars follows on December 17, 2027.
The hiatus lands during an unusually compressed production window for the studio. The Russos have spent 2026 finishing post-production on Doomsday while simultaneously prepping Secret Wars, a workload Anthony Russo described to Collider after this year’s Comic-Con panel as complicated but thrilling. That overlap is part of why the pause reads as notable rather than routine: it’s not a gap between two separate productions, but a stop inside a project that had reportedly already started shooting scenes, including what one insider called one of the “craziest” sequences of the production so far.
Whether the five-week break reflects a scheduling accommodation for the Doomsday release push, a scripting gap, or something else entirely is not addressed in the Filmbase report. Marvel has not moved either film’s release date, and nothing in the crew alert suggests a change to the December 2026 or December 2027 windows.
Secret Wars carries outsized stakes for Marvel regardless of a five-week pause. It’s the final chapter the studio has spent nearly a decade building toward since Downey first left the franchise, with a cast list that now includes actors from three separate eras of Marvel’s screen history sharing scenes together for the first time.
Is a hiatus this early in filming a sign of a production still finding its footing, or standard breathing room for two of the most complicated blockbusters Marvel has ever attempted back to back?
Sign up for the Ayla Rin: Gateway to Doom Crowdfund, coming soon for great cosmic comic books:
NEXT: Lanterns Outpaced Agatha All Along’s Viewership in Less Than Half the Time