A Script That Shouldn't Exist, But Did
Alan Cumming has always been one of cinema's more eccentric presences—an actor equally at home in cabaret, Shakespeare, and blockbuster spectacle. So when he casually mentioned in an interview that he once had a script for Avengers: Doomsday, it sounded less like a revelation than a provocation.
Cumming, who embodied the blue-skinned Nightcrawler in Bryan Singer's X2: X-Men United (2003), recalls the script as “surreal, a little mad, and very unlike what Marvel eventually became.” He describes paging through it with equal parts bemusement and disbelief. This wasn't Kevin Feige's precision-calibrated MCU; it was Marvel's wilderness era, when rights were splintered and the idea of an “Avengers movie” was practically science fiction.
And yet, here we are, in 2025, awaiting the actual Avengers: Doomsday—a tentpole locked for December 18, 2026, already generating anticipation as the penultimate chapter in Marvel's Multiverse Saga.
The Long Road to Doomsday
To understand the odd weight of Cumming's anecdote, you have to remember the early 2000s. Marvel, pre-Disney acquisition, was licensing out its crown jewels: Spider-Man to Sony, X-Men to Fox, Hulk to Universal. A unified Avengers lineup was impossible. What existed instead were scattered experiments—scripts that read like fan fiction, pitches that died in boardrooms, and projects that would never escape development hell.
Avengers: Doomsday was one of those ghosts. The title floated, scripts circulated, but nothing stuck. It was too expensive, too unwieldy, and too far ahead of its time.
Now, with Marvel officially placing Doomsday on its release calendar, Cumming's memory has transformed from trivia into context. We've gone from a discarded treatment in a drawer to the most closely guarded blockbuster script of the decade.
Alan Cumming and the Nightcrawler Legacy
It's fitting that Cumming would be the one to unearth this story. His portrayal of Nightcrawler remains one of the X-Men franchise's most haunting achievements: vulnerable, spiritual, and grotesquely human beneath the prosthetics. In hindsight, his career intersects with Marvel's own uneven evolution.
Cumming left the franchise after one film, citing the grueling physical demands of the role, but he has remained amusedly adjacent to comic book culture. His claim about the Doomsday script underscores how porous and uncertain the superhero landscape was. He was part of an era when actors stumbled onto scripts that may or may not ever become films.
Contrast that with today's Marvel, where scripts are locked behind biometric scanners and NDA clauses that could fill a legal library.
From Lost Script to Imminent Reality
Marvel's Avengers: Doomsday is no longer rumor—it's the next seismic event on the release calendar. Positioned as the darker, more apocalyptic precursor to Avengers: Secret Wars, the film is already drawing fevered speculation. Which heroes survive? Which universes collapse?
Cumming's memory of an alternate Doomsday script serves as a reminder that even the cleanest cultural juggernauts are built on a mess of failures, rewrites, and abandoned drafts. Marvel's final product may look bulletproof, but beneath the surface lies the same chaos that once gave Alan Cumming a screenplay that made no sense.
The Industry Echo
For Hollywood, this anecdote matters because it highlights the fragility of canon. The Marvel Cinematic Universe didn't arrive as a master plan; it was jury-rigged over time, guided by hits (Iron Man) and misses (The Incredible Hulk). If one executive in 2004 had signed off differently, we might have seen a Frankenstein version of the Avengers a decade earlier—miscast, disjointed, and likely forgotten.
Instead, Marvel played the long game, and audiences were rewarded with a saga that reshaped box office logic. That makes Cumming's revelation less about gossip and more about roads not taken.
Conclusion: A Doomsday That Finally Arrives
Alan Cumming's recollection is a reminder of how precarious the superhero genre once was. A script in the wrong hands, a half-baked crossover, and the MCU could have been stillborn. Instead, we get to watch Avengers: Doomsday unfold on December 18, 2026, with the full might of Disney's machine behind it.
What Cumming once dismissed as a strange script is now a billion-dollar inevitability. That's the irony of Hollywood: yesterday's trivia becomes tomorrow's headline.
