Sebastian Stan recently admitted to Decider that he has not seen his forthcoming film, "Avengers: Doomsday," does not know how it turns out, and merely guesses the plot will be "probably heartbreaking." Naturally, the internet has rushed to infantilize him, lamenting that a key star of a multi-billion-dollar franchise is being kept in the dark by the Disney machine. But let us be absolutely clear: this enforced, total ignorance is the sign of a healthy, functioning Hollywood.
For too long, the discourse has championed the dangerous idea that performers need to understand the stories they are telling. I was discussing this very delusion over a rather bruising chopped salad with a senior Disney strategist at the Polo Lounge last Tuesday. He looked exhausted, burdened by the modern expectation that the people standing in front of the green screen should be permitted to know which digital alien they are pretending to punch. Stan's refreshing lack of basic narrative comprehension proves the adults are finally back in charge of the rollout.
Think about the corporate liability of an informed actor. When you give a man playing a 106-year-old supersoldier with a vibranium arm a full script, you invite him to have opinions on his character arc. You invite "collaboration." Before you know it, he is asking why Bucky Barnes would say a certain line, rather than simply hitting his tape mark, staring at a tennis ball on a stick, and letting the post-production rendering farm in Burbank do the actual acting.
By withholding the plot, the ending, and presumably the names of his co-stars, Marvel has achieved the purest form of cinema: the actor as a totally blank, compliant vessel.
If the talent knows they survive the third act, they start asking for backend points on the sequel, which is fundamentally disrespectful to our shareholders.
Stan's admission that the film is "probably heartbreaking" is exactly the level of vague emotional gesturing we should demand from our A-listers. He doesn't know why it's heartbreaking. He doesn't know who it breaks the heart of. He just knows that his reps negotiated a very lucrative deal for him to look sad against a chroma-key backdrop for six weeks in Atlanta. That is the job. The sooner we strip away the romantic illusion that these people are storytellers rather than highly-compensated physical assets, the sooner the box office can recover.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with Robert Downey Jr.'s team during the "Endgame" press tour, where they privately marveled at the sheer logistical triumph of giving Tom Holland fake scripts. It was treated as a cute quirk then, but it was actually a vital prototype for the future of the medium. Why stop at fake scripts? Why not film every actor in total isolation, feeding them isolated syllables to be stitched together by an AI algorithm?
Some bleeding hearts will argue that it must be difficult for Stan to promote a movie he knows nothing about. Please. I assure you, it is much harder to be the PR executive who has to stand off-camera with a laser pointer, ready to zap the talent if they accidentally stumble into a coherent thought about the film's themes. Stan is doing exactly what he is paid to do: looking rugged, expressing generalized anticipation, and reminding the public that he, too, will be buying a ticket to see what he did last summer.
The only thing truly "heartbreaking" about "Avengers: Doomsday" would be if the studio had wasted valuable corporate time trying to explain the multiverse to a man whose primary function is to frown while holding a prop gun.
We find that providing context to the cast only confuses them and delays the visual-effects pipeline, so we’ve transitioned entirely to having them shout various vowel sounds into a bucket.
So let us applaud Marvel for holding the line. Let us celebrate a return to the golden age of the studio system, where the people on the poster are the last to know what the poster is for. When "Doomsday" premieres, Sebastian Stan will sit in that theater, completely oblivious, experiencing the magic of the Disney conglomerate exactly as the rest of us do: as a captive consumer who has absolutely no say in what happens next.