Even outside the critical and commercial success of the entire Avengers franchise, Joe Russo says he and his brother Anthony tried to inject their movies with a sincere sense of their own personal political beliefs. In fact, Joe recently told The Guardian that they did what they can to inject said beliefs into all of their Marvel movies, including the wildly-popular Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. The filmmaker made sure to point out a film like Endgame is very much about the political environment between 2016 and 2020.
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“Those movies are very much about what went on in this country over the past four years,” Joe told the paper. “They were about standing up for what you believe in, irrespective of the cost, and I think we’re losing sight of that. For some reason, in the UK and in the US, some of the worst people were being attracted to politics and were representing us collectively.”
He added, “It was affecting our collective mental health, and it was reflecting poorly on our character. We believed strongly that the reach in those movies was so significant that they could be influential in helping people make potentially make better decisions. We thought that they were a really powerful tool, at exactly the right time.”
Outside of the Avengers franchise, the sentiment is as obvious as ever. The duo’s first Marvel project with Captain America: The Winter Soldier is their most politically-charged film to date, and Captain America: Civil War didn’t come close to backing down off the idea.
Even now that they’re done working with Marvel Studios for the time being, the two plan to keep with the process with their smaller-scale fare — including the Tom Holland-starring Cherry.
“We believe in this concept called the mastermind principle,” added Joe. “[That] states that two minds are not doubly better than one; they’re exponentially better. We believe that we’re at our best when both of our brains are on the story at hand, and the day-to-day, creative decisions that get made when you’re executing a film.”
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