Captain America: Brave New World

Disney

We are now six months away from the release of Avengers: Doomsday, the first full-on Avengers movie since April 2019. That film, Avengers: Endgame, is considered the pinnacle of an MCU that began in earnest in 2008, focusing on the core members of the comic team. Now, Doomsday must work with a mostly disparate group, and try to pull it together after a very unsteady pair of “phases” that often produced more misses than hits.

And there were hits, certainly. Without question, Spider-Man led the charge with the pair of Far From Home, which made $1.1 billion, and No Way Home, $1.9 billion. The last stop before Doomsday is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, where a billion seems likely, if not probable, for that film. Another winner, though technically using non-MCU characters at the time, was Deadpool and Wolverine with $1.3 billion. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Guardians of the Galaxy Part 3, Thor: Love and Thunder and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever also did well.

The misses were vast, however, with multiple record-low points in box-office earnings. Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Eternals, Quantumania, The Marvels and Thunderbolts, all earned less than $500 million. The Marvels now holds the record, by far, for the worst-earning MCU movie in history, bringing in only $206 million globally, far, far from an era when the just-okay Captain Marvel made $1.13 billion in 2019.

What needs to happen effectively with Doomsday is a baton-passing. Very few pre-Endgame heavy hitters have survived to this point. There’s Thor, and the dragging back of Chris Evans to play Steve Rogers, though not Captain America, a baton awkwardly passed to Sam Wilson over the course of a show and a not-great movie. There remains a great mystery as to how and why Robert Downey Jr. has returned to the MCU as Doctor Doom, the main villain in the film, and whether this is some alternate version of Tony Stark inside the suit (though it’s claimed that’s not the case).

The timelines here are awkward. Shang-Chi has not been seen onscreen since 2021, even though a sequel was and still is in development. It took four years for Sam Wilson to show up again between Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Brave New World. In contrast, there are also extremely new teams here, introduced within the past year, The Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts. We’re talking 10+ cast members who have barely one year in the MCU.

There is also the old, very old. An alternate universe version of the X-Men has reappeared, the FOX versions, which has scooped up a handful of characters, including the 85-year-old Patrick Stewart and the 87-year-old Ian McKellen, back to play Professor X and Magneto, respectively.

That may be the biggest baton handed over here, as it’s been abundantly clear that the focus of post-Doomsday content, likely even starting with Avengers: Secret Wars, will be the MCU version of the X-Men, featuring a recast, younger class of heroes. But here, we are “saying goodbye” to the FOX cast, which has been around since the year 2000, for about the third time. And in some cases, like say, recasting Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, seems borderline impossible. If teeing up this cast is a miss, that does not bode well for the next era of the MCU.

Will Avengers: Doomsday “work”? It’s gone through different iterations and departed directors and writers, but now the Infinity War/Endgame team of Anthony and Joe Russo is meant to clean up and create something significant.

There is no indication that we are in full-on superhero fatigue at this point, despite this last era. As said, Spider-Man remains king, is about to put up another billion-dollar movie with two more in a new trilogy to come. At least a handful of other films approached that billion mark, though many would argue that despite that kind of box office, there has been a quality dip. Most of the lowest-scored movies in MCU history are all from the post-Endgame era. And unfortunately, it’s often the case that quality still underperforms like the recent Thunderbolts, and I would argue that while imperfect, The Marvels was far better than the billion-dollar-earning film that preceded it.

Avengers: Doomsday now goes up against the previous four Avengers movies that, not adjusted for inflation, earned between $1.4 billion for Age of Ultron to a genuinely unreal $2.7 billion for Endgame, second only to Avatar in the all-time list.

Doomsday has a billion in the bag, there’s little question about that. The hodgepodge cast and the arguably terrible marketing thus far will not override the desire of fans to see another Avengers movie, these old characters in action and a Downey Jr. Doctor Doom, plus whatever surprises are no doubt lurking in the film. It’s a logical prediction that Doomsday crosses the original and Age of Ultron, getting over $1.5 billion, but $2 billion may be out of reach.

It’s not just this movie and Secret Wars, however. Marvel needs a coherent plan for the MCU going forward. So far they seem to have settled on moving away from pricey MCU Disney Plus shows and focusing on quality street-level content like Daredevil: Born Again (though thus far, that has been very underwatched). The next phase after this is a bit up in the air. Shang-Chi 2 and Black Panther 3 are supposed to be coming, plus two more Spider-Man movies (though you could argue that Spider-Man movies are hits because they’re mostly self-contained, and not big set-ups for something else). The biggest test will be how the X-Men are handled, as this is probably the most significant moment of introduction since the birth of the MCU, given the team’s importance in Marvel, and they cannot get it wrong. And that starts with Doomsday.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.