Less than two weeks before Spider-Man swings back into theaters for Brand New Day, Marvel Studios has unleashed the first full-length trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, the Russo brothers-helmed team-up movie that promises to breathe new life into the Marvel Cinematic Universe following its post-Endgame rough patch.
Ironically, part of that “new life” is reaching way back into the past, as this film brings Fox’s X-Men cast — including Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Kelsey Grammer, Alan Cumming and Rebecca Romijn — alongside a slew of returning franchise veterans, including, somehow, Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers.
We get a few good glimpses of Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom, albeit masked, who seems to handle himself pretty well against Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, who apparently is leading the Avengers team this time around. We see Channing Tatum’s Gambit — uproariously funny in 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine — battle it out with Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi. Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova squares off against Romijn’s Mystique. The Fantastic Four team up with the Wakandans. Rogers wields Mjolnir. And, most importantly, fans everywhere hope this all lives up to the massive hype.
I’m reasonably optimistic about this one, but I also don’t think there’s any way it can live up to expectations. What made the one-two punch of Infinity War and Endgame so effective was that it was the two-part culmination of 11 years of interconnected storytelling. It’s been seven years since Endgame, and the lead-up to Doomsday pretty much amounts to two post-credits scenes in last summer’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps. There have been individual movies I have liked a great deal over the past half-decade or so, namely Thunderbolts*, but most of the recent Marvel films have felt like postgame DLC, to borrow from gaming parlance. Everyone is just doing side missions, and the team-ups and battles we see in the trailer don’t mean a ton to me yet because nothing has led to this point. It’s as though everyone from these disparate stories is just smashed together because Avengers is in the movie title.
I hope the film itself will do the heavy lifting in making the last two phases feel connected. I guess we’ll all find out when Avengers: Doomsday hits theaters Dec. 18.
Until then, join me in overthinking the trailer above!
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