With five months to go, Marvel Studios finally dropped the first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. While it does deliver the goods one would expect from a Marvel crossover movie, it fails in feeling like a worthy conclusion to the Multiverse Saga.
Like many this morning, I pressed play on the Doomsday trailer with excitement. Finally, after seven years, we are getting a new Avengers movie! At first watch, the trailer had me sold. The Multiverse is colliding. The Avengers and the Fantastic Four and the X-Men together at last. It seemed to have everything fans would want from a saga-ending crossover movie.
And then I rewatched the first Avengers: Infinity War trailer.
Avengers: Doomsday trailer lacks the earned payoff that made Infinity War so exciting
Infinity War was the beginning of a 10-year payoff for those who had been with the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Iron Man. We saw characters that had multiple appearances come together for the first time. Doctor Strange and Iron Man. Thor and the Guardians of the Galaxy.
The trailer is masterfully edited. The music, the narration, and the clips all work together to really give this sense that this is the end of The Infinity Saga. Thanos, who Marvel had been slowly building up since 2012, also moved into the spotlight, showing us just how much of a threat he could really be.
None of that is on display in the Doomsday trailer. Instead, it feels like we’re jumping into a show in its seventh season. We’re just supposed to accept that we’ve seen little to no buildup to Doom or the impending collapse of the multiverse.
Characters who have dealt with the Multiverse and its incursions, who should be the true leads of this movie, are either barely shown (Loki) or nowhere to be seen (Doctor Strange). Marvel is continuing to keep Robert Downey Jr.’s Doom hidden, instead relying on the FoX-Men, Thor, and Steve Rogers to get us hyped.
It works… until it doesn’t.
Steve had his perfect ending, so coming back with no proper buildup feels unearned. The X-Men nachos getting reheated for what feels like the 20th time now feels unearned. The Gambit vs. Shang-Chi fight will certainly be a highlight, but these are two characters who have only appeared one other time in the MCU before Doomsday.
In Infinity War, all the major players had at the very least two appearances in the MCU, but most had close to half a dozen. We haven’t really seen the New Avengers serve as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and we haven’t seen Sam Wilson’s Avengers at all. This will be the Fantastic Four’s second appearance, too.
If anything, Doomsday feels more like a sequel to last year’s releases — Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts*, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps — than an epic conclusion to Phases 4 through 6 of the MCU.
Whereas The Infinity Saga felt connected by all its crossovers both big and small, the Multiverse Saga’s buildup is lacking, and that’s evident in the Doomsday trailer giving us a shot of a dozen characters who haven’t interacted with one another until this very movie. Half the movie is probably going to be spent introducing everyone to one another.
Look, I’m still excited for Doomsday. I love the MCU, and that’s not going to change. I wish Marvel had done some things differently, but, hey, at least we’ll always have the Infinity Saga to fall back on.
