Hollywood, Please Bring Back Making-Of Documentaries

Marvel kicked off their year-long marketing push for Avengers: Doomsday, the company’s most anticipated blockbuster in half a decade, with a clock.

Their YouTube channel now includes a video titled “DOOMSDAY CLOCK,” counting down the months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the film’s release. At least as of this writing, the video’s image — the Avengers’ logo backlit by green light — never changes. It’s literally just a digital clock ticking down to December 18.

This comes on the heels of Marvel’s big social-media stunt to introduce the cast of Avengers: Doomsday, when they spent an entire afternoon slowly (and I mean very slowly) panning down an enormous row of chairs arranged inside an empty soundstage, gradually revealing, one by one, the names of the actors in the film. After more than five hours and 20 minutes of this, Robert Downey Jr walked into frame, sat in his chair, shushed the camera, and left.

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The overarching message of this campaign: We can’t you anything about Avengers: Doomsday. Be grateful we’re showing you the backs of these chairs. You’re just going to have to show up on December 18 and see the rest for yourself.

Marvel has a long track record of obsessively guarding its spoilers. The one time I visited a Marvel set, for Spider-Man: Homecoming, and they brought our group of journalists visit the production offices, there were multiple signs hung in every hallway and near every elevator reminding employees about maintaining the strictest level of security.

And why not? The air of mystery around Marvel’s movies helps stoke anticipation for them, fueled by theorists (including this website’s) who speculate wildly about every tiny clue and tease, amplifying fans’ excitement in an internet echo chamber.

I am sure this approach will work for Avengers: Doomsday just like it worked for Spider-Man: Homecoming and so many other MCU films. But the brazen nothingness of these teases (An endlessly ticking clock!) really struck me in this case, because it stands in such stark contrast to the way earlier generations of blockbusters were hyped.

20 years ago, for example, Peter Jackson fans could follow the progress of his remake of King Kong online thanks to regular video updates from the set. Jackson himself appears in nearly every single one, providing information about what day of the shoot they’re up to and what they’re working on at that particularly moment.

These “Production Diaries,” which typically ran around five minutes each, were shared regularly on the (now-defunct) website KongIsKing.net. Some of the diaries were superficial — one featured Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis, and Colin Hanks jokingly arguing over the value of on-set video playback — but their subject matter was surprisingly wide-ranging and often quite comprehensive.

One update explains the ins and outs of 35mm cameras; how to load a film magazine, how to “check the gate.” One is just about the steam on King Kong’s New York City set; how it’s created, how it’s supplied through a series a pipes, and where the hell the real steam in the real New York City comes from. (Or is it just a cliché of period fiction?) Another video is about the one member of the production whose entire job involved warning the rest of the crew when a plane was about to take off from a nearby airport and ruin their sound recording.

A second batch of diaries follows post-production week by week up to the film’s world premiere, taking viewers into the process of visual effects, compositing, pickups, sound re-recording, mixing, and more.

Cumulatively, the King Kong production and post-production diaries run nearly six and a half hours of behind-the-scenes content. I’m not sure all the Blu-rays and digital copies of new releases I purchased in 2025 collectively had six and a half hours of behind-the-scenes content.

Now obviously, this is an extreme example. King Kong was a remake of one of the most famous films ever made; most people were familiar with its plot and characters already. He didn’t need to stress out about spoilers. Jackson was also in a unique position in the film industry when he made King Kong thanks to his enormously successful Lord of the Rings trilogy. Still, documentaries about the making of almost any movie in 2026 are nearly as extinct as the dinosaurs that Kong fights with on Skull Island.

One reason why is obviously the collapse of the home-video market. Jackson didn’t just make his diaries to promote the movie’s theatrical release; he knew, thanks to The Lord of the Rings, that he could then repackage that content as bonus features for the King Kong DVD. But he made so much behind-the-scenes content for King Kong he was able to collect them into their own DVD called King Kong: Peter Jackson’s Production Diaries. It came in a giant box that looked like Carl Denham’s briefcase.

This thing didn’t even include the actual movie! It was a box comprised entirely of special features! 2005 was a wild time.

Again, this is an extreme example. But almost none of the Hollywood studios put money into special features anymore. All of their focus is on streaming — and I guess bonus materials don’t do perform on streaming, because none of the streamers invest in them either. Technologically, there’s no reason these companies couldn’t offer commentary tracks or extra supplementary features. They simply choose not to.

There are very rare exceptions. Disney+ recently uploaded a documentary miniseries about the Avatar franchise, Fire and Water: Making the Avatar Films. Like Jackson’s old diaries, these films offer fascinating insights into an extremely high-tech film production. (Like Jackson’s diaries, they were also timed to promote a new film; in this case Avatar: Fire and Ash.) Director James Cameron and his team explain how motion capture technology works, and how they adapted it to work underwater, something no one else had ever done before.

Maybe I’m just an old man yelling at clouds. But I miss the days this sort of content was the rule, rather than the exception; when you could watch your favorite movie and then immediately dip into the DVD or Blu-ray to find out how the coolest moments were conceived and conjured into reality.

And yes, I can (and do) buy old Blu-rays, and discs from companies like Criterion, Kino Lorber, Arrow, and Vinegar Syndrome, who are producing new bonus features on their excellent home video releases. But there’s only so much these companies can do, given their budgets, and the modern market for physical media. And there is a really big difference between retrospective content made years or decades later and the you-are-there immediacy of the old King Kong approach, which sadly seems to have been almost entirely abandoned now that home viewing has shifted from discs to streams.

I am sure Marvel is recording some behind-the-scenes material on the Avengers: Doomsday set. I am not sure we’ll ever get to see much of it beyond the vaguest and most cursory featurettes they can toss on YouTube or whatever meager selection winds up on the 4K. They could use that stuff to help promote Avengers: Secret Wars next year, but I would bet on Forbush Man showing up to save Earth’s Mightiest Heroes before I would expect Marvel to pursue that sort of strategy.

Worst of all, I’m not sure anyone but me even cares. After all, if Marvel lifted the curtain on Doomsday, fans wouldn’t get to speculate about what they are doing. They wouldn’t be able to theorize about Doctor Doom’s plans, or how the Fantastic Four hook up with the Avengers. And that, more than anything, seems to be the name of the game these days. Ignorance is not only bliss; it’s a pastime.