Avengers Doomsday brings back everyone? (trailer)
Marvel Studios has released the first full trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, the film in which practically every surviving superhero, several previously retired superheroes and quite possibly a few actors who happened to be walking past Pinewood Studios must unite against Doctor Doom.
Robert Downey Jr returns to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, although not as Tony Stark. This time he is Victor von Doom, armoured ruler of Latveria, scientific genius, sorcerer and owner of the sort of voice that suggests the hotel minibar will be added to your bill whether you touched it or not.
The trailer finally gives us a proper look at Downey’s Doom. He appears less interested in conquering one world than in reorganising the entire multiverse, presumably because ruling a small European country no longer offers the professional satisfaction it once did. His arrival coincides with universes colliding, realities beginning to buckle and several dozen famous people discovering that their contracts contain a “multiversal emergency” clause.
Facing him are the Avengers, the New Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the Wakandans, the inhabitants of Talokan and the original cinematic X-Men. Calling this an ensemble cast is rather like describing the Death Star as a moderately ambitious building project.
Chris Hemsworth returns as Thor, Anthony Mackie is Sam Wilson’s Captain America, Florence Pugh leads the New Avengers contingent as Yelena Belova, and Pedro Pascal brings Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four across from their retro-futuristic universe. Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn, Alan Cumming and Kelsey Grammer are also back as members of the earlier X-Men film family.
Somewhere in the production office there must be a wall-sized spreadsheet maintained by three nervous accountants and guarded by Doctor Strange.
The largest surprise, beyond Downey exchanging the Iron Man armour for something with more ecclesiastical menace, is the return of Chris Evans as Steve Rogers. His conclusion in Avengers: Endgame seemed fairly definitive, but definitive endings have become rather less definitive since Marvel discovered the multiverse. In comic-book cinema, death is now closer to an inconvenient train replacement service.
The trailer shows Rogers once again wielding Mjolnir, because if you are going to bring Captain America back, you may as well let him borrow Thor’s hammer before anyone starts asking awkward questions about chronology. Thor himself appears unusually grave, suggesting that the Russo brothers have confiscated the screaming goats and placed them somewhere secure.
There are glimpses of Reed Richards trying to understand the catastrophe, Professor Xavier looking worried, Magneto being encouraged to apply his talents to New Jersey and assorted heroes meeting one another with the traditional mixture of suspicion, solemnity and expensive computer-generated scenery.
The tone is noticeably darker than much of Marvel’s recent output. Nobody appears to be pausing during the apocalypse to explain that the apocalypse is awkward. The Russo brothers seem to be returning to the grand, ominous style of Avengers: Infinity War, where jokes existed but knew better than to wander into the room while Thanos was working.
That shift may be deliberate. The MCU has spent the years since Endgame expanding in every conceivable direction, producing new heroes, alternative timelines, streaming series and enough homework to make casual viewers feel they require a postgraduate qualification in Quantum Cameos.
Doomsday looks designed to gather those scattered pieces together, place several familiar faces prominently near the front and reassure audiences that Marvel remembers how to build a proper cinematic event. Bringing back Downey, Evans, the Russos and the Fox-era X-Men is not subtle. It is Marvel smashing the emergency glass and discovering that all its most valuable actors were stored inside.
The gamble is Doctor Doom himself. Doom is not merely another intergalactic bruiser with a glowing weapon. At his best, he is arrogant, brilliant, wounded, theatrical and utterly convinced that humanity would be happier if it simply stopped arguing and let him run everything. He can build a time machine before breakfast, summon demons after lunch and spend the evening reminding Reed Richards that he has once again failed to recognise Doom’s obvious superiority.
Downey is therefore an intriguing choice, even before the inevitable question of whether this Doom resembles Tony Stark. The trailer wisely treats that mystery as a source of unease rather than immediately explaining it with a diagram. Several heroes appear to recognise something disturbing beneath the mask, while Doom himself behaves like a man who already knows how their story ends.
The film also appears to be laying the foundations for Avengers: Secret Wars, due the following year. That means audiences should probably not expect every collapsing universe to be neatly repaired before the credits. Marvel has two enormous films, multiple realities and several generations of superhero franchises to funnel towards the same destination. Somewhere, a continuity editor is staring into the middle distance.
Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we are particularly pleased to see Ian McKellen’s Magneto and Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier back again. These gentlemen have now spent more than a quarter of a century alternately opposing one another, joining forces and apparently surviving events specifically designed to remove them from future sequels. Mutant longevity is a splendid thing, particularly when supported by a dependable theatrical agent.
Whether Avengers: Doomsday restores the MCU to its former box-office dominance remains to be seen. The trailer certainly understands the assignment. It has returning legends, collapsing realities, heroic speeches, ominous armour and enough crossover encounters to keep YouTube theorists nutritionally sustained until Christmas.
Avengers: Doomsday reaches UK cinemas on 18 December 2026. By then, viewers may wish to refresh their memories of approximately thirty-eight films, several television series and whatever happened in the post-credit sequence they missed while searching for their coat.
