Dreading Doomsday

Just before Christmas, when Avatar: Fire & Ash hit theaters, Marvel dropped the first of four teasers for Avengers: Doomsday. I was already halfway to the liminal space, so I told Lainey I would deal with it when all four teasers were available online. I regret to inform you, that day is here. The fourth teaser was released online yesterday, so with a sigh and a look into the middle distance, it is time to talk about the Avengers.

The first teaser features Chris Evans, officially returning as Steve Rogers. He pulls up in front of a quaint farmhouse on a motorcycle, the Avengers’ theme plonks mournfully on a piano. Steve looks at his old Captain America uniform, presumably he is in some state of retirement. Then he picks up a baby. Gasp, Captain America has a son.

I could not give two sh-ts about that kid. And yes, I know canonically Steve has a child, James Rogers, who is part of the Young Avengers, and if James Rogers sprung fully formed out of the ground and was like, “Hey, I grew up off screen,” I’d be fine with it. But if there is one thing I loathe in storytelling, it’s thrusting babies on characters who simply do not require them. Remember I was blah about Raylan Givens becoming a father on Justified, and here it bugs me for the same reason—Steve Rogers just doesn’t need a kid.

The shorthand is that by acquiring a kid, we’re going to care about Steve more. It’ll raise the stakes for his return to Avengering. Maybe we’ll worry more about his fate. But Steve doesn’t need a kid for any of that to work. He got his happy ending, a life of peace with Peggy Carter, at the end of Endgame. My problems with that resolution are a separate conversation (in short: a cop out), but it was a completion for the character. He finally got to put the shield down.

Interrupting that peace is enough. No baby needed, taking Steve out of his retirement has enough stakes and narrative resonance to make me care that he picks up the shield again. It’s similar to how Morgan Stark really wasn’t needed for the stakes for Tony Stark to be high in Endgame. I cared about Tony and his fate because of ten-plus years of good storytelling, I already bought into his journey, I didn’t need a kid to make me care more. I know I’m probably in the minority on this, but Steve picked up that baby, and I immediately felt like Joe and Anthony Russo don’t trust us to just care about Steve for his own sake. Also, I have Thoughts And Feelings about Steve Rogers trading his Harley for a Triumph, but I’ll save those for another day.

Thor is in a similar boat to Steve, as he is now a dad, raising the daughter he acquired in Thor: Love & Thunder.

I appreciate that Thor is trying to break the cycle of generational violence for his daughter, Love, but again, I don’t really care about Thor having a kid. It was a cute way to end Love & Thunder, but they could’ve written the kid out and no one would have even noticed. Does anyone even remember Thor: Love & Thunder? I guess the Hemsworths would have noticed, as Chris Hemsworth’s actual daughter, India, plays Love. (Sidebar: I think “Love” is a great name, it’s an underutilized virtue name!)

I don’t need Thor to have a kid to care about him, especially since he is eventually going to find out Loki is still alive (again) but is basically trapped in the world tree. THAT is the narrative I’m invested in, not “Love and Thunder”. I can understand they don’t want to reveal Loki yet, but that relationship is the one carrying all the stakes for Thor.

The third teaser features the X-Men, particularly Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier, Ian McKellan as Magneto, and James Marsden as Cyclops, apparently back from the dead.

Probably the biggest draw for Doomsday is seeing how they introduce the OG X-Men to the Avengers. I have long said a huge reason the MCU took off is because they did not have “cooler” characters like the X-Men to lean on, and the writers and filmmakers of the early MCU movies had to figure out how to make C and D-list characters interesting to audiences. But now Marvel has all their toys in the same box, will they start smashing the action figures together with no regard for narrative and character development? I hope not, but it is the eventuality I have always feared. You don’t have to try as hard to tell a good story when you can just rely on flashy characters.

The final teaser dropped yesterday and features Shuri and M’Baku meeting Ben Grimm from the Fantastic Four. Interesting mash-up.

This is the only one of the teasers that actually piques my interest. M’Baku is now the king of Wakanda, which makes a lot of sense. I’m also intrigued by Wakandans meeting the Fantastic Four, who are from another dimension. I wonder if their world even had a Wakanda? It kind of seemed like Fantastic Four happened in a post-racial world, it looked like the 1960s but it was not the actual 1960s. The Wakandans and Fantastic Four co-existing is the kind of crossover that makes the MCU fun.

The question is whether or not it’s too late. I’m still not all-in on superhero fatigue—the movies do just well enough to show that people are still willing to show up—but it is clear the large-scale audience has fallen off since Endgame in 2019. Casual viewers have checked out. Can Doomsday get them back? That I’m not sure about, as it does feel like average audiences are looking for something different, and Doomsday is clearly trying to be Endgame Redux. The issue is, of course, that we’re just not as invested in the story this time around. Endgame was the culmination of ten years of storytelling, Doomsday is coming on the heels of five years of very mixed-bag work.

There is also the Dune of it all. Right now, both Doomsday and Dune: Part Three are slated to open on December 18. There’s an effort to make “Dunesday” happen, but these two movies are too similar for that. Barbenheimer worked because Barbie and Oppenheimer could not have been more opposite in tone and style. But Dune and Doomsday are cut from the same cloth, they will just cannibalize the audience. Warner Brothers hasn’t started advertising Dune yet, though, so there is still time to shift that date somewhere else. And don’t make the Superman mistake that Marvel did last summer—put at least a solid month between these two movies. It really doesn’t help anyone to dare audiences to choose, you want to set audiences up to succeed in seeing both. Both! Work TOGETHER. I’m sure they won’t.

We have eleven more months of this advertising drip for Doomsday, as that infernal “Doomsday clock” informs us. I’m lowkey dreading it. Dreading the discourse, dreading the Russos continuing to speak in public (these aren’t teasers? By definition they are, they’re teasing the existence of Doomsday). I’m dreading the think-pieces and handwringing about how Marvel will ever survive with Robert Downey, Jr. and the OG Avengers. Clearly, they won’t! That’s why they’ve brought them all back! We had this discussion six years ago and nothing has changed! At least in one regard, Marvel better hope nothing has changed, and they can once again dominate the pop cultural landscape with an Avengers movie.