It’s been a rough few years for Marvel. In the post-Avengers: Endgame era, there have been films that have seldom managed to garner the kind of acclaim that movies routinely did before the Infinity Saga came to an end. Even when the studio managed to find its footing, with films like Thunderbolts*, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the returns that these films generated failed to bring in the kind of money that the studio had gotten accustomed to.
While there were smash hits like Deadpool & Wolverine and Spider-Man: No Way Home, these successes had become aberrations instead of the norm for the studio. This state of the studio had been attributed to a number of things. Fans wanted a new Avengers team, with characters like Black Panther, Shang-Chi, Doctor Strange, and Spider-Man leading the charge against Kang the Conqueror.
However, with the controversies that surrounded actor Jonathan Majors and the various other unfortunate events like the death of Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman, the future of Marvel Studios became more and more uncertain with each passing day. With money-making characters like Iron Man and Captain America benched in the Infinity Saga, there was a lot of groundwork that had to be laid for the studio to return to its former glory.
Even with characters like Thor, Captain Marvel, and Doctor Strange, Marvel Studios was not able to deliver the kind of stories that fans wanted to see, which made it very difficult to visualize the same type of success with films like Doomsday and Secret Wars. However, thanks to the nature of the story that was being told and Disney’s purchase of 20th Century Fox, Marvel Studios gained a lifeline that it began exploiting almost instantly.
With the rights to characters like The Fantastic Four and the X-Men, Doomsday and Secret Wars could now shape up to be the spectacle that it was expected to be, but with one problem. There weren’t any characters that fans would actually care about, as indicated by the chatter online and the box office numbers that these films were doing.
It seems that Marvel has decided to focus on giving fans what they finally want, as indicated by the three teasers that Marvel Studios has released. These teasers also have the task of building up Doctor Doom, who was slotted into the Multiverse Saga after Kang the Conqueror was removed from being its main antagonist. So far, the three teasers look at three different corners of the wider Marvel Multiverse, all of which is now part of the MCU.
The first teaser that was released has Steve Rogers marking his MCU return for the first time since Avengers: Endgame. In the teaser, Steve is depicted as a family man, with a baby in his arms, for whom he must join the fray once again to save the world. This is an interesting parallel to that of Tony Stark, who had similarly settled down by the time the events of Avengers: Endgame rolled around. With his return promised in Avengers: Doomsday, it remains to be seen how Steve Rogers reacts to joining the fight once again.
Another character who has been promised to return in Avengers: Doomsday is Thor, who fans last saw in Thor: Love and Thunder. Love and Thunder marked the fourth Thor film in the wider MCU, an honor that characters like Iron Man and Steve Rogers did not get. In the teaser that was released, Thor was back in his old haircut, the one that fans saw in Avengers: Infinity War and Thor: Ragnarok, praying to Odin so that he can return to Love, who Thor has left behind to join the battle.
The third teaser has garnered the most attention, given that it depicts Ian McKellen’s Magneto and Sir Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier, along with James Marsden, returning as Cyclops from his X-Men days over at Fox, this time in a suit ripped right out of X-Men: The Animated Series.
Fans already know that The Fantastic Four will be making an appearance in Doomsday, given that Doctor Doom appeared in the post-credit scene for the film. Further, the Fantasic Four’sa space ship also appeared in the post-credit scene for Thunderbolts*, which could be the beginning of the events of Avengers: Doomsday.
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These teasers, of which there will be more, are a clear push to build the kind of hype that Marvel needs for this film to be a success. One of the first moves was to bring back Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, which many fans have taken as an indication that Tony Stark might also make an appearance in the film.
All things considered, Avengers: Doomsday is going to have to do a lot of legwork to get the hype that it needs for the film to be a success. What is crucial here is to make fans as invested in the fate of the characters as they were in Endgame and Infinity War, and Marvel Studios is looking to achieve that by bringing in the X-Men from the Fox era, but putting an MCU spin on things. It is expected that the MCU version of the X-Men is going to be a mix of the characters as they appeared in X-Men ‘97 and as they were played in Fox’s X-Men Universe.
