‘Avengers: Doomsday’ Used 80% Practical Sets, and Marvel Fans Are Going to Love This

Marvel fans have spent years voicing frustration over the franchise’s growing reliance on digital environments, with complaints about weightless CGI battles and obvious green screen work becoming a near-constant refrain online. That criticism has only intensified in recent years, making the studio’s biggest upcoming crossover event an especially high-stakes test of whether Marvel has actually been listening.

‘Avengers: Doomsday’ has been positioned as one of the most ambitious entries in the franchise’s history, bringing together an enormous ensemble that includes Anthony Mackie’s Captain America, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, and returning X-Men veterans like Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and Ian McKellen’s Magneto. With expectations already sky-high, fans have been watching closely for any sign of how the Russo brothers plan to handle the film’s massive visual scope.

That’s exactly why a recent comment from the film’s production designer is generating so much buzz. Gavin Bocquet revealed that roughly 80 percent of the film’s interior sets were built with physical backings rather than relying on blue screen, a significant shift away from what he described as the franchise’s previous default approach.

Speaking on The Young Indy Chroniclers podcast, Bocquet explained that Marvel’s standard practice had typically been to put up a blue screen and add environments digitally afterward. For ‘Doomsday,’ the team instead built physical or painted backings wherever feasible, allowing much of the footage to be captured entirely in-camera rather than composited together in post-production.

That shift reportedly started even before principal photography on ‘Doomsday’ began. Bocquet pointed to the film’s post-credits tag scene, which appeared at the end of ‘Thunderbolts*,’ as an early example of the new approach, noting that actors on set were visibly surprised to find themselves working entirely with practical environments rather than the usual all-digital backdrops.

According to Bocquet, that scene needed to be shot well ahead of schedule since ‘Thunderbolts*’ was still finishing its own theatrical run, leaving the crew only three days to complete post-production work. That tight turnaround pushed the team to lean even harder into practical, in-camera solutions rather than digital fixes.

Bocquet credited directors Joe and Anthony Russo with fully supporting the practical-first philosophy, describing filmmaking as fundamentally an art of illusion that benefits from physical execution whenever it’s realistically possible. He was careful to note that the approach couldn’t be applied universally, given the sheer scale of environments and characters involved in a film of this size, but that the team pursued it wherever it made sense.

This kind of behind-the-scenes transparency arrives at a particularly useful moment for Marvel, given the wave of criticism the studio has faced over its VFX pipeline in recent years. Reports of rushed effects timelines and overworked visual effects artists have followed several of Marvel’s biggest releases, making any genuine pivot toward practical filmmaking feel like a meaningful response to that ongoing conversation.

Whether audiences actually notice the difference on screen remains to be seen once ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ finally arrives in theaters. Still, knowing that the production made a deliberate effort to ground its visuals in physical sets rather than defaulting entirely to digital environments should offer some reassurance to fans who’ve grown skeptical of modern blockbuster filmmaking techniques.

With the Russo brothers returning to direct their first Avengers film since ‘Endgame,’ expectations for ‘Doomsday’ were already sky-high before this latest reveal. Knowing the production leaned so heavily into practical craftsmanship only adds another layer of anticipation heading into its release.

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