Robert Downey Jr. is back. Gambit’s sticking around. The MCU finally has a villain again. So why does the Avengers: Doomsday trailer feel so empty?
Marvel had a trailer ready for Comic-Con this weekend and decided the convention itself could wait. The Avengers: Doomsday footage dropped to the entire internet before a single badge-holder in San Diego got to scream about it in a hall. Somewhere, GTA 6 is taking notes on how to actually ship something.
In case you missed it, here’s the Avengers: Doomsday trailer, above. Got it? Great!
The trailer itself is…good. Not backflips-off-the-couch good, but good in the specific way Marvel needed it to be good. Good enough, maybe? It has a lot of faces, a little bit of Doom, and just enough mystery to keep the podcasters employed for another six months. Reactions across the internet so far appear to contain a mix of real excitement and professional exhaustion. Which tracks for basically everyone still showing up to these movies in year eighteen.
The villain language.
The headline, obviously, is Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom. And the Avengers: Doomsday trailer’s first order of business is to let him talk. The voice sounds somewhere between a vague Eastern European menace and a full Werner Herzog impression, and somehow both descriptions are correct. It’s not quite an accent so much as a vibe, the same vibe every third-world-coded villain in a blockbuster has been assigned since the genre invented itself. Doom at least sounds like a capital V villain.
The bigger trick is the casting. Fans wanted Mads Mikkelsen, and there’s a real case for it. The guy has been so thoroughly typecast as elegant evil that handing him a green cloak feels less like stunt casting and more like destiny fulfilled. Instead Marvel handed the role to the man who built the MCU’s entire emotional foundation as Tony Stark. And sure, the trailer leans into that discomfort rather than hiding from it.
One shot, for example, shows Doom lifting two fingers, and his armor casually shrugs off Thor’s best attack. That was always Stark’s superpower too — genius wrapped in metal, ready for anything. Doom is just what happens when you let that same genius twist in the other direction. Whether he’s actually a Stark variant, a multiversal impostor wearing Tony’s face to earn trust, or something stranger, the trailer wisely refuses to say. That’s the correct instinct. Let the audience sit with the wrongness of the face for a while before explaining it away.
Nostalgia fatigue.
Marvel has spent the last few years mainlining cameos like a studio trying to win an argument through sheer headcount. And the Avengers: Doomsday trailer flirts with the same move. Loki’s back, Shang-Chi is back, the X-Men are back, Steve Rogers is back. Our expectations are…well.
The X-Men material in particular earns its keep. A torn-up Xavier School sign opens the footage, and Magneto and Professor X get a charged reunion that feels more like decades of repressed devotion finally surfacing than a wink at the camera. Mystique’s shapeshift into Black Widow includes the small, correct detail of her eyes staying slightly blue underneath. That’s a costume department paying attention, at least, especially when we see Cyclops in what appears to be comic-book accurate attire. So yeah, this all suggests these characters are being folded into the story rather than paraded past it.
Gambit gets the same benefit of the doubt. Channing Tatum’s Cajun mutant showed up in Deadpool & Wolverine as a fun, forgettable walk-on from the multiversal junk pile. Here, he looks like an actual part of the ensemble, which raises a better question than “remember this guy?” It’s more like, how exactly did he get here, in this universe, at all? Guess we’ll find out.
Steve Rogers didn’t need to come back.
Then there’s Captain America, and this is where the Avengers: Doomsday trailer starts to feel less like a collection of cynical boardroom decisions. Steve Rogers got the cleanest, most emotionally complete sendoff of any Avenger. A full life he earned quietly, off to the side of the spectacle.
So bringing Chris Evans back doesn’t build on that ending so much as politely erase it. It feels like a reaction to how poorly Captain America: Brave New World performed, rather than a good idea someone had for a good reason. The internet is already thrilled, understandably, because it’s Steve Rogers and the trailer knows exactly what a shot of him catching that hammer is worth. But “everyone missed the original guy, so here he is again” is the least interesting possible use of one of the MCU’s only actual endings.
The honest hope here is that Marvel might be sitting on a twist nobody’s expecting. Like Hydra Cap, an evil variant, anything that justifies undoing a perfect goodbye. The much more likely outcome is a straightforward, crowd-pleasing return, precision-engineered to generate exactly the applause it’s already getting in some corners. Sometimes the obvious move is obvious. But it’s still worth wanting better.
The pivot from Kang was never going to be smooth.
The deeper issue with Doomsday has nothing to do with any individual scene and everything to do with how they built the movie. Or were planning to build the movie, anyway. Yes, this was supposed to be Kang’s story. Jonathan Majors was supposed to be the connective tissue running underneath Loki, Quantumania, Multiverse of Madness, and No Way Home. And then he wasn’t, and Marvel had to reroute an entire saga around a character who — by design — has spent the whole build watching from the shadows instead of standing in the center of it.
Doom is a slow-burn villain by nature. He doesn’t arrive out of nowhere. He’s supposed to have already been there, stealthily running things while everyone else was busy. Swapping him in for Kang on short notice means the connective tissue that should exist doesn’t. And it shows in the places the Avengers: Doomsday trailer rushes past.
The Fantastic Four — the characters with the actual decades of personal history with Doom — get exactly one movie before getting thrown into an ensemble this size, with barely a beat established between them and their arch-nemesis before the fists are already flying. Shang-Chi gets a return with no real second chapter behind it. The trailer appears to want us to feel something specific for Namor, a character we met four years ago in Wakanda Forever, but does anyone really care about him? At all?
The seams are visible, not because any of it is conceptually bad necessarily. But because you can feel the movie doing three saga’s worth of work in three build-up films instead of the six or seven the Infinity Saga got to work with.
So, comic book movie or the comic book movie?
Perhaps the biggest issue is that there’s an unsettling feeling watching a trailer for a visually confident blockbuster that probably shouldn’t feel all too confident about itself. Not in the wake of The Odyssey, at least. Or Dune: Part Three, which still hilariously shares a release date. Audiences sent Hollywood a clear message this past year, that they’re not interested in these cash-grab, make-a-buck CGI machines they used to show up for in droves back in 2019, then only once in a while since. They want movies like The Odyssey, Project Hail Mary, Obsession, and Backrooms. They want movies that meet the cultural moment of 2026, not 2019.
Because let’s be clear, Marvel wants so badly for Avengers: Doomsday to be the second coming of Avengers: Endgame. Yes, they want the huge box office, first and foremost. But more pressing is that they need a Hail Mary (see above). They need a movie that returns them to the Mount Olympus of surefire, theater-swarming “moments.”
But does anyone really get that sense from…this? From what so far appears to be a garishly average popcorn movie wearing Endgame‘s jacket?
For what it’s worth, the other multi-hero team-up hitting theaters first — Spider-Man: Brand New Day — currently has the stronger pull. If only because it’s not carrying the weight of being the franchise’s referendum on itself. It gets to just be a good time, hopefully. Doomsday has to be everything at once. A course-correction, a victory lap, a proof of concept for however many years of MCU still to come. That’s a lot to ask of one trailer, let alone a whole cinematic universe.
Avengers: Doomsday opens in theaters on December 18, 2026. Watch the trailer here.
Images courtesy of Marvel Studios.
Jon is one of the co-founders of InBetweenDrafts. He hosts the podcasts Thank God for Movies, Mad Men Men, Rookie Pirate Radio, and Fantasy Writing for Barbarians. He doesn’t sleep, essentially.
