Why Marvel is going back to familiar faces
Avengers: Endgame closed a defining chapter for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2019. Tony Stark died, Steve Rogers left the fight through time-travel retirement, and the franchise also moved past major versions of Black Widow, Gamora and Vision. It felt, at the time, like a planned handoff to newer characters.
That handoff has been uneven at best. Marvel introduced or expanded heroes such as Moon Knight, She-Hulk and the Eternals, but the post-Endgame era has not carried the same cultural weight. Spider-Man remained a reliable draw, and Deadpool’s return brought in the kind of attention Marvel used to generate almost automatically. Beyond that, the superhero marketplace has looked far less secure.
Marvel is going back to the one thing it knows still works: recognition. Robert Downey Jr. is reportedly being paid more than $80 million to come back, not as Iron Man, but as the classic Marvel villain Doctor Doom. Chris Evans is also back as Captain America. If this sounds like the studio checking every emergency box at once, that is because it more or less is.
Who else is expected in the crossover?
The artwork also places the returning mutants alongside a broad Marvel roster. The lineup includes the Fantastic Four, Thor, Loki, Ant-Man, Black Panther, Falcon as Captain America, Shang-Chi and the Thunderbolts.
The cast is huge, even for Marvel, and that is saying something. Still, some absences stand out. The art does not show Wolverine or Deadpool, currently two of the most bankable mutant characters. It also gives no sign of Spider-Man, Hulk or Punisher, despite those characters being tied to the next Spider-Man film.
Spider-Man reportedly is not slated to appear in Avengers: Doomsday at all, which is surprising given how reliably the character performs at the box office. Of course, concept and promotional art are not legally binding contracts with the audience. Marvel characters have a habit of appearing when the studio wants applause, and earlier Doomsday concept art reportedly included Doop, so the door to odd surprises is not exactly locked.
What is riding on Avengers: Doomsday?
The stakes around Avengers: Doomsday are unusually high. Like Grand Theft Auto VI in gaming, the film is being treated as the kind of release that can affect the mood of an entire business. Disney is trying to prove that the large-scale comic book crossover still has the power it once did.
Recent box office signals have been mixed to grim. Spider-Man films continue to perform, but superhero titles more broadly have lost momentum. Supergirl and He-Man are described as two of the year’s biggest box office disappointments, and even the latest Star Wars release underperformed. Meanwhile, audiences have shown strong interest in original genre films such as Obsession, The Backrooms and Project Hail Mary.
That shift matters because Doomsday is not arriving in an empty marketplace. It is set for release in December, directly opposite Dune: Part Three. Marvel is betting that nostalgia, star power and one very crowded cast can still bring people back to theaters. The Shanghai art makes it pretty clear which emotional buttons Marvel wants to push. Whether audiences still want to press them back is the expensive question.
