Contemplate mortality with Avengers: Doomsday

Luke Winkie wrote an article last month for Slate about aged Beach Boy Mike Love performing with, essentially, a new band also called the Beach Boys and doing it at the age of 85. You can, and should, read it here, and let the specter of an octogenarian singing teenaged sun-and-fun songs haunt you as it has haunted me. I bring up this article about Mike Love clinging to the corpse of the Beach Boys because the full trailer for Avengers: Doomsday dropped yesterday and I am having a lot of thoughts about age, retirement, and mortality.

Does Avengers: Doomsday look bad? No. I’m actually intrigued by an Avengers movie centered on Thor, the member of Marvel’s “big three” that always got shunted aside because it never felt like anyone ever really knew what to do with him (except Taika Waititi, once). Do I trust anyone knows what to do with him now? Also no. But Doomsday doesn’t look bad, per se. It doesn’t look all that exciting, either, not after Marvel already burned through their nostalgia bank with Avengers: Endgame and Deadpool & Wolverine.

The most obvious problem for Marvel is simply that nothing they’ve done recently, including the GOOD movies they’ve made, has really worked. Oh, people still like Spider-Man, but people will always like Spider-Man, just like people will always like Batman. Some of these characters are perpetual motion machines. But leaving aside the absolute top-tier most beloved characters, Marvel has made a few good movies in the last few years, and they’ve underperformed as audiences are clearly ready to move onto other things.

But the biggest problem for Marvel might be that THIS story at THIS time feels totally unearned. Doomsday is teasing not only Robert Downey, Jr.’s turn as a villain, but also an Avengers/X-Men team up that brings the Fox X-cast into the MCU, to a far greater extent than the Deadpool movies have achieved to date. That SHOULD feel like a big deal, but the reality is, the X-Men movies faltered throughout the 2010s, running out fan interest. The best thing X-Men have going for them at this point is Deadpool and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and Marvel has already punched that ticket.

Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s easy to armchair quarterback these decisions, but if this is where Marvel wanted to go all along, why was the MCU not bending more deliberately toward an X-Men/Avengers crossover? Maybe because everyone hates a multiverse and no one would really have the patience for it, but if THIS was the plan, then the path is obvious, in retrospect. After Endgame, put the Avengers on ice, full stop. Shift to the X-Men. Make only X-movies for several years. Save the casting that still works, recast roles where characters never took off, and build out the X-wing of the MCU. Then, just about now, five or six years down the line, stage the crossover, bringing back the beloved “old” Avengers teams to interact with the new X-Men. Then it would mean something, we’d be actively invested in the X-Men, not just biting on nostalgia bait.

Like, duh, right? It’s so obvious it makes me wonder if Doomsday really was the plan all along, or if this materialized after it became clear no one was buying into the multiverse and they just need to end it as fast as possible. Seeing this trailer, I just find it hard to believe this is how Kevin Feige really wanted the “multiverse saga” to end, with blatant nostalgia for something not even ten years old as the strongest selling point.

I am a Marvel fan, I WANT to like these movies, X-Men/Avengers crossovers were fun and awesome when I was reading them in comic books growing up, but I look at this trailer and all I can think is, Oh sh-t, you really don’t have anything in the tank, do you? Which makes me feel terrible because I know a lot of great people are working very hard on Doomsday, and I am rooting for them, I truly am, but clearly something creatively is broken at Marvel.

They’re starting to circle the same “nostalgia over story” drain as Lucasfilm and Star Wars. Just like Star Wars needs to move past Skywalkers, the MCU needs to move past Tony Stark/RDJ and the original Avengers. At some point, they are actually going to have to figure out how to make audiences fall in love with new characters. They have not succeeded in doing that in the last six years, and I don’t think Doomsday will change anything, either. Nothing lasts forever, not even the biggest hitmakers.