Marvel has found a new way to sell Avengers: Doomsday to people who would otherwise spend Friday night watching grown men chew gum in a dugout. A new preview aired on Fox during Game 1 of the World Series, as the Milwaukee Brewers hosted the Tampa Bay Rays, and Major League Baseball has since posted it on its YouTube channel. For British readers, the World Series is America’s baseball championship, open to teams from the United States and, on a generous day, Canada. It’s a naming policy that would make the Eurovision Song Contest blush.
The preview opens with Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards throwing the ceremonial first pitch, using the sort of arm extension that would get a mortal pitcher drug-tested. Five real players are cut into the footage: Freddie Freeman, Randy Arozarena, Bryce Harper, Junior Caminero and Jacob Misiorowski, who started Game 1 for the Brewers. Misiorowski jokes that these ceremonial first pitches are getting bigger and bigger. Then Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom arrives in the sky over the ballpark, and Harper delivers what may be the most sensible line in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: “We gotta go. Like, now.”
The detail worth pausing on is the setting. Reed is pitching at Ebbets Field, in a Brooklyn Dodgers cap. In our world the Dodgers played their last game at Ebbets Field in 1957, decamped to Los Angeles, and the ground was knocked down in 1960 to make way for flats. The Fantastic Four, however, come from Earth-828, the retro-futurist reality of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, where the space race was evidently better funded and the architecture never stopped looking like a 1960s World’s Fair. Marvel hasn’t said so, but a working Ebbets Field and a Brooklyn cap suggest that in Reed’s universe the Dodgers simply never left. That would make Earth-828 the one corner of the multiverse where Brooklyn baseball fans got a happy ending. Freddie Freeman, who plays for the Los Angeles version, may wish to avoid the subject.
Baseball is only the wrapping, though. According to ComicBook.com, the spot also slips in fresh film footage: Thor and Steve Rogers in what looks like the New Avengers’ tower, talking about whether the former Captain America can still wield Mjölnir; an Ant-Man moment that settles Sam Wilson as the current Captain; a new shot of Sam’s Avengers team; a hint of the returning X-Men; and a glimpse of the Wakandans. Steve last picked up Thor’s hammer in Avengers: Endgame, so a conversation about whether he’s still worthy suggests his retirement to the 1940s with Peggy Carter may not have been quite as tidy as advertised. Running a scene about a man’s ability to swing a heavy object during a sporting event built entirely around men swinging heavy objects is either a coincidence or the proudest moment of somebody’s marketing career.
We’ve already had two looks at Doom, in Marvel’s first trailer and the special look in which Sue Storm explains that Victor used to be kind. This preview doesn’t add much to his character beyond confirming that he arrives the way thunderstorms do, from above and without an invitation. Anthony and Joe Russo direct, with heroes drawn from the MCU, the Fantastic Four’s world and the old Fox X-Men films, and Doom apparently at odds with all of them at once.
Avengers: Doomsday opens in cinemas on 18 December 2026, the same day as Dune: Part Three. That leaves the pre-Christmas audience a choice between a man in an iron mask who wants to rule the universe and a young man in desert robes who already does.
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