Alright! Recently some concept art was released for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday that showcases the New Avengers, old Avengers, Fantastic Four, X-Men, and a Doctor Doom that looms over them menacingly. It reminded me of the concept art for Avengers: Infinity War, an image that would become ingrained into my 14 year-old mind that similarly showed the mega ensemble.
But something has changed in those eight years, and I don't think it's that I became an adult who's increasingly apathetic and wary of new things; no, I think there are a variety of factors that are causing Marvels' next Avengers-level threat to feel like an ordinary Tuesday, and here I will present ten of them:
1. Marvel isn't as strong a brand anymore
One of the biggest reasons Infinity War felt like such an enormous event and Doomsday does not is because good payoff requires good setup. Infinity War came off the heels of an unprecedented cinematic streak wherein the MCU had massive blowout hit following massive blowout hit. They were like the Pixar of blockbusters, finding enormous critical and commercial success with every venture: Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and (especially) Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther got people excited to see how these heroes would intersect in Avengers: Infinity War. Marvel had proven themselves by making six back-to-back bangers, as well as eight prior years of solid hits, all of which were very clearly leading to this massive crossover movie. The people were excited!
But once the dust settled and COVID-19 came and went, there was a deluge of Disney+ shows that devalued the Marvel brand. Popular shows such as WandaVision and Loki couldn't balance the scales when Secret Invasion, Echo, Iron Heart, Hawkeye, She-Hulk, What If...?, Marvel Zombies, and Agatha All Along were negatively received or completely forgotten. Watching these shows didn't prove to be essential to understanding the overall Marvel story either, as many of the characers dropped off the face of the earth once their series finished, such as the popular Moon Knight, Werewolf by Night, and Kate Bishop. Sometimes it actively worked against the cinematic experience, with Multiverse of Madness ignoring most of what WandaVision set up, and now we're at the point where even a superb Disney+ show such as Wonder Man can't attract burnt-out Marvel fans and gets cancelled after one season.
The film front didn't fare much better - The MCU received its first ever negative critical reception with Eternals, although it would soon be joined by Thor: Love and Thunder, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Captain America: Brave New World, and fans would appear indifferent to movies such as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, The Marvels, Thunderbolts*, and Fantastic Four: First Steps. The movies started losing money as well, which had never really happened to Marvel before (The Marvels is one of the biggest box office bombs ever). People were quick to cry superhero fatigue but even quicker to overlook the enormous successes of Across the Spider-Verse, Shang-Chi, Deadpool & Wolverine, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, all of which had one thing in common: Good reviews.
It's one thing to make 19 movies with generally positive reviews and combine them into a mega hit, but it's quite another to make 16 movies and 20 TV shows and only have scattershot successes with preestablished characters such as Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Deadpool, and then expect people to care when the b-listers team up.
2. It's the second or first appearance for many of the characters
Again, compare to Infinity War: Of the main ensemble - 30 characters - only one person is introduced completely within the context of the film, Peter Dinklage's dwarf Eitri, who appears in a minor supporting role as the weaponsmith who creates Thor's axe Stormbreaker. Everyone else was on their third or fourth MCU appearance, with all of them appearing in one of the six movies released in the two years prior (see the graph below).
Then you see the Doomsday cast and the story is quite different. There are a few mainstays such as Thor, Ant-Man, and Yelena, as well as the puzzling return of Steve Rogers, but nearly everyone else is on either their second appearance or will be introduced in the film. Additionally, the time since we last saw the characters is much longer, as is the case with Thor and Black Panther, who were both last seen in 2022 (see graph below).
This means that Doomsday will have a lot more set-up and exposition to get through: The relationship between characters who we've never seen interact, the status quo of the world, who the Avengers even are, establishing Doctor Doom as a threat, and integrating the Fantastic Four to Earth-199999. It's further complicated that Doomsday is playing with the Multiverse and introducing characters from Fox's X-Men series, most of whom were last seen 12 years ago as cameo appearances in X-Men: Days of Future Past and one of whom was last seen in 2003's X2. It's a very assorted bag of Marvels.
3. Doctor Doom isn't as big a threat as Thanos
Introducing Thanos in Infinity War works because he's a mad titan with one simplistic goal of collecting the Infinity Stones and annihilating half of all life. It's not a very complex or hard-to-explain motive, and one brief flashback to his homeworld is all the explanation Infinity War needed to explain the character of Thanos. In the source material Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos' motives are even more childish and easily explainable - he's trying to woo lady Death. Baseline, Thanos is not a very complex character, so all he needs is the proper power scaling, which Infinity War gave him when he killed Loki and one-shot the Hulk. Additionally, his weapons of choice, the Infinity Stones, had already been established in prior movies as very powerful artifacts capable of destroying entire planets.
Avengers: Doomsday, meanwhile, has the looming threat of Doctor Doom, the archenemy of the Fantastic Four. Doctor Doom... is not Thanos. While it's not clear how the MCU will change his origin, in the comics it's a complex marriage of politics, technology, and sorcery: Born to a witch put to death, Victor Von Doom grows up an impoverished Romani outcast in Latveria, studies ruthlessly, goes to college in the United States, meets his future rival Reed Richards, and builds a machine that blows up and scars his face. Running away from his failure, he travels the world and learns mystic arts, creating an advanced suit of armour through sorcerery and melding it onto his scarred face. He eventually returns to Latveria, leads a revolution, becomes its king, and from there continues as the power-hungry archenemy of the Fantastic Four and villain of the Avengers and Spider-Man.
This is a story that could be a movie in and of itself - a really good one, too.
While the MCU has never been completely 100% comic accurate, a key component of Doctor Doom's intrigue is his complex and long-standing rivalry with Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four - the key words being long-standing. A lot of the payoffs and intensity that come from the Secret Wars comics (either the 1984 one or the vastly superior 2015 one) stem from that rivalry, and given that the MCU's Fantastic Four movie came out last year and Doctor Doom wasn't even in it, that rivalry is non-existent.
It has thus been alleged that Doctor Doom will instead be obsessed with Steve Rogers and be a multiversal warlord, although this is such a fundamental shift for the character it's as if the Joker were obsessed with Barry Allen and also the Anti-Monitor. Keep that with a grain of salt, though, since it's only a rumour, and the MCU Doom will still go down as the best iteration of the character (by default). The stunt casting of having former Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr. is the only thing keeping Doctor Doom interesting, and RDJ's passion for his Marvel return is the only thing keeping Doomsday relevant.
4. The Avengers haven't assembled
Entangled with the character statistics and Doom's backstory is the major issue that Avengers: Doomsday hasn't been set up by prior MCU movies. The Infinity Saga is truly masterful in the way it's set up: Infinity Stones are major plot points in their most popular mega crossovers while exposition is placed in potentially weaker properties like the second Thor or the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, creating a timeline where only three movies aren't super essential to understanding Infinity War: Iron Man 3, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Spider-Man: Homecoming. And while those three aren't essential to understanding Infinity War, they're also some of the best entries in the entire MCU - everyone wins. The information is set up evenly across the board, and post-credit appearances from Thanos started six years earlier and slowly vamped up through his cameos in Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and the cliffhanger ending of Thor: Ragnarok.
The narrative within the movies made sense as well: The Avengers were divided through the events of Age of Ultron and Civil War, so when Bruce Banner returns via Doctor Strange and Tony Stark is unwilling to call Steve Rogers, we understand why this is all happening. We saw them break up, we saw Hulk leave, and we saw Doctor Strange gain his powers, and now we've successfully connected four prior movies in an emotionally relevant way to the movie we're currently watching. Infinity War does this on multiple levels as Thor teams up with Rocket Raccoon and Groot, Black Panther and Captain America fight in Wakanda, and Spider-Man meets the Guardians of the Galaxy. It won't make sense to the people who've never seen prior MCU movies, but it's not trying to.
This is not the way Doomsday has been set up.
Fantastic Four: First Steps was released without the slightest mention of their relationship to Doctor Doom, and an entire movie about the multiverse, Deadpool & Wolverine, was released without any references to the storm on the horizon. This means that when compared to Infinity War and it's 17 film prologue, Avengers: Doomsday is being set up primarily through Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts*, and Fantastic Four: First Steps's post-credit scenes. Hard to create hype or excitement when all of the set-up is only a year old, and a third of it is from Captain America: Brave New World.
Outside of the film chronology, Doomsday faces a major issue that has affected the MCU since Endgame: Who even are the Avengers? Are they still around? What is their place in the world? There haven't been any team-up movies to establish the status quo so far, and consequently we haven't seen how the loss of Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, and the retirement of Hawkeye and Bruce Banner has affected the team. They've been asking this question since Spider-Man: Far From Home but haven't come up with an answer. As stated earlier, Infinity War didn't work because Thanos had two post-credit scenes and a cameo, it was because the momentum of the Avengers story had continued in a way that was coherent to the audience over the course of several films, something Doomsday lacks entirely.
We've introduced a lot of newcomers, but there was no Winter Soldier or Civil War buddy cop movie to establish their relationships. Even when connections were made (Like Yelena and Kate Bishop), they were never explored or seen again. We know that Captain America (Sam Wilson) will lead the Avengers, but we don't know anyone on the roster - based on the cast announcement, it looks to be an all-boys team with Thor, Ant-Man, Shang-Chi, and baby Falcon, none of whom we have ever seen team-up or work together, even when we take into account the Infinity Saga movies (Thor barely knew Ant-Man and last time Ant-Man and Sam Wilson interacted was the airport battle).
Avengers: Doomsday is both the first team-up movie in the Multiverse Saga and also the triumphant finale, plus a movie where not only must the Avengers assemble, but also team up with three different teams - The New Avengers, the X-Men, and Fantastic Four. On top of all that we have to introduce the Doctor Doom and X-Men lore. That's a lot for any movie, but potentially fatal for a franchise people already feel is imploding.
There are a few backstage factors to consider, although I don't think they're entirely to blame: Originally announced as Avengers: The Kang Dynasty in 2022 alongside Avengers: Secret Wars, the main villain of what is now titled Doomsday was supposed to be Kang the Conqueror, but several things happened in 2023 that threw a wrench in that plan: The actor who portrayed Kang, Jonathan Majors, was found guilty of harassment and fired by Marvel Studios, Quantumania bombed, there was a major writer's strike, and the director of The Kang Dynasty moved on to the new Spider-Man movie. After some restructuring, some soul searching, an expensive corporate retreat, and a very desperate call from Kevin Feige, RDJ and the Russo Bros returned to the tune of $90 million.
While The Kang Dynasty would have been more cohesive with Phases Four and Five as a whole - it would have starred the Young Avengers and Shang-Chi, no Fantastic Four or X-Men - It is safe to say that Doctor Doom has always been the endgame villain, even before Kang was dropped. Between Secret Wars being Doom's story, the Fantastic Four movie, and Kevin Feige himself saying he was thinking about Doom before Quantumania, there really is no excuse for the lack of in-universe buildup that Doctor Doom has had.
5. Missing People
Well, fine, if you want to restructure and do all that, fine. That happens all the time for big studio franchises that start bombing. But what kills me are how many characters from phases four and five are missing from the current announced cast. Good intuition tells me that Doomsday will indeed have cameos galore, although my Spider-Sense tells me they'll be legacy characters such as Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man and Deadpool, not established MCU characters. The MCU went into overdrive with Phases 4, 5, and I think we're on 6 or 7, but a large part of how disjointed Doomsday feels stems from the aforementioned lack of consistency between characters.
While the full cast hasn't been revealed, there are some notable absences from the roster already:
You have established Avengers such as Captain Marvel, Wasp, Spider-Man, Clint Barton Hawkeye, Vision, and the Hulk, plus their allies and would-be Avengers such as Nick Fury, Ms. Marvel, Photon, Kate Bishop Hawkeye, Star-Lord, Valkyrie, and She-Hulk. The masters of the mystic arts, Doctor Strange, Wong, and America Chavez are all missing, as are the Guardians of the Galaxy. And then there are a few isolated heroes that might be good to reconnect to the larger story - the Eternals, Moon Knight, Swamp Thing, and Werewolf by Night.
Some of these absences are especially puzzling, such as Photon, who ended The Marvels in the X-Men universe, and America Chavez, whose ability to create interdimensional portals would probably be really useful in a multiverse hopping movie. Some are characters I'd personally like to see more of: Adam Warlock, Kate Bishop, Star-Lord, Ms. Marvel, and Captain Marvel, and there's a whole sleuth of post-credit scene cameos that we're still waiting on such as Blade, Black Knight, Eros, Hercules, and Clea. It's odd to bring in the Fox X-Men when we have an entire Avengers roster of Avengers characters that should probably show up in the next Avengers movie.
6. Taking the Wrong Lessons from Secret Wars
It seems like it would be pretty easy to keep the Young Avengers and Shang-Chi team from The Kang Dynasty but switch out the villain for Doctor Doom, but Marvel Studios appears to have entered a panic mode. They need a mega hit, so they're dropping anything mildly connected to Disney+ and rushing their major teams and legacy characters to star in the same movie, no buildup needed.
This, in a way, makes Avengers: Doomsday the perfect spiritual successor to the 1984 comic Secret Wars, which was infamously created to sell toys and had a paper-thin plot where a grab bag of heroes were teleported to a planet called Battle World and had to fight their archenemies. It was lambasted as a cheap, juvenile attempt to entice readers who would recognize the faces on the cover and think it was cool they were all interacting for the first time.
Enter 2026 and Avengers: Doomsday. Enter that concept art. Enter the trailer. What do we see? What are people excited about? Recognizable faces on the cover and the idea that it's cool to finally have a movie where the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Avengers team-up. Hopefully the story is a bit better than the 1984 comic, but it might not be beating the "zero artistic merit" allegations that the source material was hit with.
7. The Worst X-Men Lineup of All Time
Theoretically, adding in the X-Men is awesome news - everyone loves the X-Men! X-Men '97 is the most popular thing on Disney+ these days, we're gearing up for the new MCU reboot, and we're at the point where we should feel nostalgic towards the Fox X-Men movies. The problem with Avengers: Doomsday is that it contains one of the worst X-Men line-ups of all time: Professor X, Magneto, Cyclops, Gambit, Beast, Nightcrawler, and Mystique.
This isn't a Stan Lee or Jack Kirby line-up; this isn't Chris Claremont; and if you've seen the old X-Men movies, you know this isn't them either. Gambit was never a part of the team, Beast is more of a cameo in X2 and X3, Nightcrawler was last seen 23 years ago in X2, and last we saw Mystique she was dumped by Magneto after losing her powers. While I'm sure these aren't the same versions from the Fox X-Men movies, it's very interesting how little consistency there is. It would make a lot more sense to bring back Jean Grey, Rogue, Colossus, Iceman, Storm, or Kitty Pryde, all of whom were major players in the last movies. Knowing the X-Men, though, they probably all died gruesome deaths and now the boys live all sad and alone in the Mansion. That's another thing, too - the X-Men have so many great female characters to choose from, and yet we have yet another all-boys team.
This X-Men lineup has a very calculated feeling of an executive thinking, "Well, it's not the X-Men without Professor X, Magneto, and Cyclops, and all those actors would love to return. If Kelsey Grammer can be convinced to appear in The Marvels, I'm sure we can get him back as well, and people liked Gambit in Deadpool & Wolverine. And if anyone's in Atlanta while we're filming, we'll invite them to set and give them a million dollars."
It's the sort of X-Men line-up you can only get by sending a group text and praying that people respond.
8. Bringing Back Christ Evans as T-Shirt Man
In such a stuffed movie, we're still leaving out one crucial element: In addition to assembling the Avengers, New Avengers, Fantastic Four, an alternate universe Fox X-Men, and introducing Doctor Doom, we're also bringing back Chris Evans, last seen in 1945 with Peggy Carter. This is particularly puzzling because he doesn't look like Captain America at all - and not just because he's not wearing the costume, he literally just looks like Chris Evans does normally. You see him on the poster and in the trailer and he sticks out like a sore thumb. A nondescript black t-shirt and tan cargo pants? When we look at his wardrobe in prior Avengers movie, it doesn't feel Steve Rogers-y in the least.
I hope they're saving the haircut, hair dye, and shave for a dramatic reveal, or it's an alternate universe who-knows-what-Skrull-lookin-thing, or he's actually the villain, because he's
literally just Chris Evans at this point (And if he is actually the villain, again - We're literally taking
Kang the Conqueror and replacing him with Doctor Doom).
It's the lack of blonde hair that's throwing me off, I think. Even when it grew out in Infinity War, it still retained the established hair color. The bar is on the floor, people.
9. Botched Marketing
Disney took a gamble and made an unprecedented trailer rollout strategy for
Avengers: Doomsday last December. Alongside the release of
Avatar: Fire and Ash, four minute-long teasers highlighting Captain America, Thor, the Wakandans and Fantastic Four, and the X-Men were released... to mixed reception. Most of them leaked online early, they were overly vague, and the most notable reception was turning the Captain America one
into a medicine ad. And if it was to try and boost
Avatar's numbers, it doesn't look like that worked, either.
The official trailer was much more cohesive and teased some interesting action, but once again the big draw is that the Marvel characters are going to be featured in the Marvel film. If you showed this trailer and the Infinity War to people in a vacuum, there's really no contest - Infinity War has an infinitely better trailer. Both tease the arrival of a big bad, but while Doomsday focuses on gathering the heroes, Infinity War has more shots of Thanos demolishing them. The brute ferocity with which Thanos fights Spider-Man and Iron Man makes him seem like a much more dangerous villain than Doctor Doom, who stops Stormbreaker with two fingers - a disgustingly false attempt at power scaling (Not even the Infinity Gauntlet could stop Stormbreaker!). Everything about Doomsday is desperate to be noticed while Infinity War grabs your attention. Doomsday also shows a lot of heroes meeting and fighting each other, which implies that the movie will mostly be character introductions, exposition, and pointless action since we know they'll eventually talk it out and work together against Doctor Doom.
10. The Movie Looks Ugly
My patience is very short for ugly blockbusters at the moment. Washed out and blurry backgrounds, yellow lighting, brown floors, backlighting - digital sets used to be a gimmick for movies like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, now it's just industry standard. Some of the CGI in the trailer looks atrociously bad, but the overall visual style of the movie is just ferociously ugly. It's like the Supergirl movie all over again, but at least that one had brighter backlighting.
Audiences are more audibly rejecting movies that look ugly. Stuff like Supergirl, Moana, and The Mandalorian & Grogu have been derided for their ugly, sterile, washed-out digital look, whilst movies like Project Hail Mary and The Odyssey are being given laurels upon laurels for their amazing visuals and expansive scope. Simply put, audiences are expecting movies with budgets the size of the GDP of the Marshall Islands to look good. They have caught on and expect more from the studios that make them.
Funny enough, ten years ago the MCU was being relentlessly criticized for the "grayscale" blockbuster look - setpieces that felt flat and probably took place near a concrete pad. It wasn't bad, it was just boring and flat. Now we're just at the point where it looks atrocious.
And to balance all of this out, there are four things I'm really looking forward to:
A More Serious Thor
After the cartoonish absurdity of Love and Thunder, I'm excited to see Thor back in his peak Infinity War characterization. He's a more serious, stoic lead now, ready to take charge and lead his team into battle against a powerful threat - it's the sort of Thor that almost killed Thanos, and I'm excited to see Chris Hemsworth make that return.
James Marsden
I never liked how the original Fox X-Men movies characterized Cyclops. That first trilogy is actually a romance where Scott serves as the straight man in the Jean-Wolverine love affair, he gets wiped out in every fight, and James Marsden's commitment to Superman Returns means Cyclops gets offed ten minutes into X-Men: The Last Stand, murdered by Jean Grey. Then Logan takes his iconic "I love you" line and kills Phoenix-possessed Jean; Cyclops is, in short, cinema's greatest cuckold. But I'm excited to see James Marsden return! He still looks ridiculously handsome, he's very passionate about the role, and he finally gets to wear the blue and yellow outfit.
Additionally, and especially after X-Men '97, more people than ever are realizing just how cool Cyclops is. He's the X-Men's leader, a husband and father who tries his best, and he draws a line in the sand when he's had too much. He's a good guy with limits and a tendency to sulk, making him one of the most "human" characters in the Marvel Universe. Hopefully Doomsday is able to portray more of his leadership skills and showcase his powers better than Lady Deathstrike wiping him out in X2.
Florence Pugh
The new Black Widow Yelena Belova is one of the best characters the MCU has ever had, mostly thanks to Florence Pugh's incredibly charismatic performance. She steals every movie or TV show she's appeared in and has amazing chemistry with other characters, so in general I'm excited to see what she does in Doomsday. It's one of the few things the MCU has done right or consistently post-Endgame.
The Glorious Return of Shang-Chi
Speaking of things the MCU did right after Endgame, remember Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings? It was the second movie in phase four and a massive success - even with COVID-19 impacting it, Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts*/The New Avengers, The Marvels, and over half of the DCEU and DCU failed to outgross it's $432 million worlwide cume. That's really good for a d-list character, and audiences were overwhelmingly positive about the movie. I think we were all excited to see Simu Liu become the new face of Marvel and appear in other MCU projects... and then it never happened. It's been five years since Shang-Chi came out, and he hasn't appeared since.
It's crazy - one of the few things that actually worked from phase four, that people liked, that people wanted more of, and he just disappears off the face of the earth. While I understand that director Destin Daniel Cretton was tapped to direct The Kang Dynasty and then Brand New Day, they really couldn't have Shang-Chi show up in, like, a Disney+ show or a post-credit scene? Again, part of the reason the early MCU worked was because of it's consistency - from 2008-2014, most of the Avengers had gotten solo, sequel, or team-up films. I am therefore appropriating Avengers: Doomsday as the Shang-Chi sequel we should have gotten in 2024.
Comments
Post a Comment