When I watched the official trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, I felt something. A familiar pang of excitement, maybe, probably brought on by the main theme. Could be nostalgia, too, especially seeing some characters in an MCU movie that I never expected to, notably a few of the original X-Men. But I mostly felt a bit… hollow. I don’t seem to care as much as I once did, and based on the reactions to the trailer and general sense of feeling surrounding the imminent release of Marvel’s next crossover blockbuster, I’m not alone.
Why? I was in my late twenties when Avengers: Endgame came out, so it isn’t as if I’ve grown out of such things in the intervening years. I’ve kept up with the so-called “Multiverse Saga”, the umbrella term given to Phases 4, 5, and 6 of the MCU, all post-Endgame, very few any good. Doomsday was supposed to be a course correction of sorts, a way to tie all of these disparate threads together into a single coherent narrative. But – based on the trailer alone, granted – I have no idea how it plans on doing that, and the vibe seems a bit inescapably desperate.
A House Divided
Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of people still hyped for a Russo Brothers-directed instalment in the MCU. It’ll almost certainly be, at a bare minimum, pretty good. It’ll make a fortune, obviously. But there’s a degree of exhaustion swirling around in the reactions that I don’t recall ever having seen before with MCU releases, certainly not the big crossover spectacles like this one.
It doesn’t help that the trailer was structured like a sizzle reel of random action sequences front-loading nostalgia and novelty spectacle. A bunch of X-Men were featured, including in fun mash-ups like Gambit vs Shang-Chi and Mystique vs. Yelena. It made sure to show us the Fantastic Four, the OG Avengers gang, and the Thunderbolts. The vibe was supposed to be reassuring. “Look, all these guys are here!”
But does it look meaningfully different? Fans seem tired of the overuse of unpolished CGI and the flat lighting, that aesthetic that almost all MCU movies seem to have. We already know that most of the things we see in the trailers for these movies are either taken out of context or entirely invented. The formula is wearing a little thin by this point, and in lieu of a more coherent narrative build-up, people are starting to notice.
In Case of Emergency, Cast RDJ
The more I think about it, the more I feel like the casting is primarily to blame for this underlying feeling of desperation. Granted, in losing its original anchor villain, Marvel had to improvise, but ever since it was announced, I never quite vibed with the idea of Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom. It felt like an emergency measure that was decided off the cuff and will have to be justified down the line.
RDJ is one of the most iconic character castings of all time. He is Tony Stark, unassailably, much like how Hugh Jackman is Wolverine. And his character had a wonderful payoff in Endgame; the end of his arc was the emotional heart of the movie. Recasting him as a villain feels like it grossly undermines that, and more to the point, given how inseparable RDJ is from Stark, I can’t fathom a scenario in which he doesn’t just come across like Iron Man in a different mask, putting on a European accent.
The Avengers: Doomsday trailer ends with the reveal of Chris Evans returning as Captain America, thoroughly undermining his own lovely ending in Endgame, and indeed Sam Wilson’s promotion to his former role. It’s an approach designed to leverage nostalgia by reassuring audiences that the OG gang haven’t gone anywhere and that this will be a proper, recognisable Avengers movie (Thor also narrates the trailer).
Lack Of Direction
The Infinity Saga was, for the most part, a coherent narrative. Early MCU Phases really mastered the art of telling a coherent individual story that also tied into a wider crossover one, building up individual teams – the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, etc. – in a way that made their inclusion in a grand finale not only logical but also earned.
The Multiverse Saga… hasn’t been like this. It has, in fact, felt like a smattering of disconnected movies and Disney+ series of wildly varying quality that largely had nothing to do with one another. We haven’t seen Shang-Chi, for instance, since his own movie in 2021, and now we’re supposed to be thrilled with the idea of him fighting a character we haven’t met yet, at least not properly. This is true of most of the X-Men who featured in the trailer. The Fantastic Four have only been in one movie, and it was set in a different universe. The Thunderbolts – and I loved that movie, don’t get me wrong – barely know each other.
It’s almost impossible that all of these disparate elements are going to be tied together in any logical, least of all meaningful, sense. I’d wager that most of the inclusions are fake-outs of some kind – Doctor Doom opens the movie killing almost all of the X-Men, for instance – and that the movie itself will settle into a more coherent and familiar formula. But without clear emotional stakes, it seems like it’s going to be difficult to care on any level beyond that of pure spectacle. Unfortunately, at least based on the marketing, the spectacle is all that Avengers: Doomsday has.
