Later this year, Marvel will come into theaters swinging with Avengers: Doomsday, the latest in its historically successful series of superhero movies. The studio has been building hype recently by releasing little teaser trailers. At least one of them leaked beforehand and spread like wildfire around the internet, showing that there’s still plenty of interest in this franchise nearly 20 years in.
That said, the trio of teaser trailers released so far has something concerning in common: they all look backwards. In an era when Marvel has struggled to build much new momentum after the conclusion of its last big story arc, it’s been relying on its past, and that strategy may well backfire sooner or later.
How Marvel came to this
From rock star to washout
Starting with 2008’s Iron Man, Marvel Studios went on a theatrical hot streak that has yet to be equaled. Movies about Captain America (Chris Evans) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) were hits, but that was to be expected: they were comic book mainstays with large followings, and Marvel was finally giving them movies worthy of their names. The really impressive thing was that Marvel managed to make hit movies centered around lesser-known characters like Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman, now Letitia Wright), and the Guardians of the Galaxy.
People turned out for these films not just because they were good, but because they were leading somewhere. Marvel was doing what comics had always done and telling loosely interrelated stories that would combine in huge crossover events: The Avengers movies, two of which are among the top 10 highest-grossing films of all time. Everything climaxed with 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, which saw the exits of characters like Captain America and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and the defeat of the villainous Thanos (Josh Brolin), whom Marvel had been hyping up since the original Avengers movie in 2012.
After that, Marvel moved on to what it thought would be the next leg of its record-breaking journey, introducing new heroes like the Eternals and Shang-Chi (Simu Liu), and building up new villains like Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors). But the new movies didn’t set theaters on fire like the last set. Maybe Marvel overestimated people’s interest in seeing where the story would go next after the end of the Infinity Saga, or maybe all the Marvel TV shows they were running on Disney+ were starting to feel less like entertainment and more like homework. Whatever the reason, box office returns started to sag; even last year’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps made only half a billion dollars, which is a ton of money, but well below what Marvel had come to expect from even movies about relatively obscure characters like Captain Marvel, whose debut film pulled in over a billion back in 2019. (Her 2023 sequel movie, The Marvels, made around $200 million, less than what it cost to produce, making it the studio’s only outright bomb.)
So what does a studio do in this situation? Lean on nostalgia and risk bringing the whole house down.
The dangers of raising the dead
Remember when you were happy?
The second of the three mini-trailers released so far, the one directly above, stars Thor, one of the few characters from the early days of the franchise who has stuck around. Another shines the spotlight on Captain America, who was given a graceful exit in Avengers: Endgame that seemed like the definitive end for his character. Meanwhile, Iron Man outright died in Endgame during the big final battle. It’s hard to get written out any more definitively than that.
But now Captain America is back, and while Iron Man will (we assume) stay dead and buried, Robert Downey Jr. is returning as the new villain Doctor Doom; I’m sure we’ll get an explanation for why he looks exactly like the late Tony Stark sooner or later. So the trio of Hemsworth, Evans, and Downey Jr. will be back together again.
It’s hard for me to look at this and not feel manipulated; Marvel has plenty of newer characters to put front and center in their next big tentpole movie, but they chose to center the first Doomsday teaser on a character and actor who once described himself as “happily retired” (via PEOPLE) from the franchise, and the second on its current elder statesman. It doesn’t feel like a marketing campaign designed to get the masses interested in a cool new movie; it feels like an attempt to remind fans of how exciting this franchise used to be.
And I suspect that will get plenty of people into the theater on opening day, but I don’t think it’s a good long-term strategy if Marvel actually wants to build something that feels relevant and interesting. It’s been many years now since Hemsworth, Evans, and Downey Jr. were at the center of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and a lot of the people thrilled by their old adventures have moved on. Newer moviegoers don’t know what the hype was about, and these teasers aren’t giving them much reason to find out.
The X-Men cometh
And probably leave-eth shortly thereafter
The third teaser trailer reaches even further back in time and features Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as X-Men characters Professor X and Magneto, last seen in 2017’s Logan and 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, respectively. Disney has finally acquired the rights to feature the X-Men in the MCU, which is neat, but it feels all too predictable that, instead of introducing new actors in these iconic roles, they’re bringing back the ones who played them decades ago. I still think that we’ll see new actors as the X-Men sooner or later, but Marvel is taking its sweet time.
Avengers: Doomsday will feature newer characters like Shang-Chi and The Fantastic Four, but it’s feeling more and more like they’ll be supporting players. Doomsday, it seems, is about celebrating Marvel’s past, which might feel like a fun novelty if it weren’t for the fact that the studio is only doing it after it tried and failed to push the franchise into the future.
Tron: Ares could’ve been great but one decision ruined it
Tron: Ares had the potential to be great, but a big choice bungled the whole thing.
Marvel needs a new idea
Avengers: Doomsday will be released in theaters on December 18, 2026. Marvel has one other movie coming out this year: Spider-Man: Brand New Day, about the further adventures of Tom Holland’s webslinger. That one will also trade on familiarity and nostalgia, since, at this point, Holland first appeared as Spider-Man a full decade ago in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War.
And there’s nothing inherently wrong with nostalgia. The problem is that it’s starting to look like it’s the only trick Marvel has, or at least the only one it’s willing to use. Personally, I’m more interested in Doomsday’s competition: Dune: Part Three, which will come out in theaters on the same day and push the Dune series into bold new territory. And there are always non-franchise superhero movies out there to enjoy, if you don’t want to live with the pressures of navigating a whole cinematic universe.
