In a move of bewildering grandiosity, Disney is debuting four teaser trailers for next year’s Marvel rinse-and-repeat, “Avengers: Doomsday,” before “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”
It’s the sort of intricate, collect-‘em-all marketing splash Taylor Swift might make, except nobody cares about the Tortured Heroes Department anymore.
Social media has been shrugging since Thursday.
The first promo that dropped this weekend stuck out though. It prominently featured former Captain America actor Chris Evans, who had claimed as recently as January that he was “happily retired” from the red-white-and-blue role (whose civilian name is Steve Rogers) after 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame.”
Making that personnel shift official-ish, Anthony Mackie, previously his sidekick Falcon, donned the main cape in February’s floperoo “Captain America: Brave New World.”
Womp womp. That dud made $415 million worldwide — a pitiful haul for the jewel in Disney’s crown that was quite recently considered the unassailable future of movies.
Said Diz: “Old world, please!”
The clip for next Christmas’ Hail Mary Pass ends with the message “Steve Rogers will return in ‘Avengers: Doomsday’.”
It’s hard to say when Evans was re-enlisted, since Marvel movies are typically shot with incomplete scripts and cram in green-screen cameos right till the bitter end. Principal photography wrapped in September and reshoots reportedly start in January. There will surely be plenty more last-second A-list additions to come.
But no$talgia for a brighter — and greener — past is definitely the name of the endgame.
Born-again Chris joins fellow “we thought you left” colleague Robert Downey Jr., whose character Tony Stark — a k a Iron Man — um, died in “Endgame.” There was a big, sad funeral scene that, everybody thought, provided an immensely satisfying close to the behemoth “Avengers” saga.
To tiptoe around that little inconvenience, Downey Jr. is instead playing the new villain, Dr. Doom. And there will surely be a longwinded explanation for his uncanny resemblance to the fallen leader of the Avengers.
That’s exactly what Marvel fans keep begging for: More complicated exposition that calls back to decades-old flicks.
How depressing and desperate.
You know what Disney’s Benny Hill scramble for a hit reminds me of?
The 1980s.
That was an altogether silly decade in entertainment when craven Hollywood could get away with murder with little to no consequences.
One of my favorite infractions: Maud Adams played the Bond girl in “Octopussy,” starring Roger Moore, just seven years after playing the Bond girl in “The Man with the Golden Gun,” starring Roger Moore, and nobody batted a GoldenEye.
Campier was on TV, when Al Corley was replaced as Steven Carrington on “Dynasty” by Jack Coleman — and the obvious change of appearance was explained away by plastic surgery after an oil rig explosion.
And, really, that’s what the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become: an expensive and knotty ‘80s soap opera that will go to laughable lengths to boost sagging numbers.
The $2 billion question is: Will their frantic pandering pay off?
Disney and Marvel Studios are on their knees praying that the past six years were, in “Endgame” parlance, a blip, and that audiences simply need to be reminded of their love of superheroes. The MCU has had just three films crack $1 billion post-Covid: “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
Most of the rest have underperformed or downright face-planted, even relatively well-reviewed tries such as “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” and “Thunderbolts.”
Also, don’t forget that “Doomsday” — apt title! — is partly the result of a company PR disaster.
The baddie taking the reins from Thanos wasn’t originally supposed to be Downey Jr.’s Dr. Doom.
Jonathan Majors, the once rising star who played Kang the Conqueror in that infestation of a threequel “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” was set to reprise his part in “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty” before an ex-girlfriend accused him of domestic violence and he was found guilty of misdemeanor assault in 2024.
Kang was KO’d.
So directors Anthony and Joe Russo, whose “The Electric State” for Netflix ranks as one of the most expensive movies ever made and is among the worst of the 2025, scrapped that and enlisted some 30 Marvel mainstays and franchise newcomers — the 20th Century Fox X-Men — to act as cinematic Viagra.
And, yes, that assist should help the aging franchise perform better than it has been.
But Disney must face facts that the era of the MCU as obligatory viewing is over. They overplayed their hand, and the lift won’t last forever. If it does, see a doctor.
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