Watch on YouTube: Avengers: Doomsday special look
Empire has gone big on Avengers: Doomsday. The magazine’s January 2027 issue, on sale from 19 November, comes with four collectible covers and a 22-page feature, and over the past couple of days it has been handing out new stills like Latverian state propaganda. The two drawing the most attention show the returning Fox X-Men: James Marsden’s Cyclops standing outside the X-Mansion with Ian McKellen’s Magneto looming behind him, and a fresh look at Channing Tatum’s Gambit.
The real story is the costume. When Bryan Singer’s X-Men arrived in 2000, the team were zipped into black leather, and the script had Cyclops ask Wolverine whether he would prefer yellow spandex. Twenty-six years later, Marsden has the blue-and-gold suit and a visor that looks as if it came straight off a Jim Lee splash page. There is a pleasing irony in the Fox mutants now looking more like their comic-book selves than many of the MCU’s own heroes. Marsden told Empire back in the summer that the film is a collision of three gigantic universes, which sounds thrilling from a cinema seat and rather less so if you live in one of them.
Tatum’s Gambit keeps the long brown coat and bo staff of his Deadpool & Wolverine cameo but, according to the actor, not the thick Cajun accent. The Russo brothers wanted a more serious tone this time, which is fair enough when the plot involves universes being eaten, though it is a loss to anyone who enjoyed watching nobody understand a word Remy said.
Elsewhere in the Empire batch, Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards stretches an arm across a doorway inside the X-Mansion to hold back Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi, Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova and Anthony Mackie’s Captain America. It tells you everything about how well the multiverse’s mightiest heroes are getting on. The issue also carries interviews with Kevin Feige, Marsden, Mackie and Pascal on the returning X-Men and the fractured state of the Avengers.
Then there is Robert Downey Jr. Feige has spent much of the year insisting that his Victor von Doom is Victor von Doom, not Tony Stark from a bad timeline. Marvel would presumably like the internet to stop drawing diagrams. The internet would presumably like Marvel to explain why the ruler of Latveria has Tony’s goatee. One of them gets its wish on 18 December, when the film opens in cinemas.
Here at SFcrowsnest we’ll settle for this: after a quarter of a century, Scott Summers finally looks like Scott Summers. If he also makes it past the first act this time (Fox killed him off almost before X-Men: The Last Stand had got going), it will be the most radical thing Marvel has done all decade.
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