Doomsday Cast

Yesterday was the big cast reveal for Avengers Doomsday. No interviews, no appearances, just a roll call of set chairs with the names of actors on them. It lacked excitement, and mostly featured side characters no one was interested in.

Nothing new there.

Avengers: Infinity War was the best of the Marvel movies.

There were real stakes because characters of longtime standing were getting killed. And then the Avengers just flat-out lost. What made it really stand out was that it was a supervillain’s story. Thanos had an identifiable arc with a beginning middle and end. He won but you were left with the impression that he felt the price had been too high even for him.

There was one jarring note at the end. The stinger where it’s revealed that Nick Fury had sent for Captain Marvel.

Nobody was really interested in this new character. She’d only been invented in the first place because Wonder Woman had created a solo superheroine that did well at the box office. It was a major embarrassment for Kevin Feige. His pride appears to have been genuinely stung by being one-upped by the guys down the street. He promised that Captain Marvel would be at a power level unheard of. Which mostly meant she was going to be an invincible Mary Sue. It made a billion at the box office but Marvel Fever was at its height because 30 days later the sequel to Infinity War would be in the theaters.

Avengers: Endgame is a movie that has aged like a fine dumpster full of fish heads in August. It seemed, okay I guess, when it was launched, Feige was jingling the keys extra hard. But there were things that felt a little bit wrong at the time that felt a lot more wrong later. Like something had been lost but you weren’t sure what yet.

That something had been the Marvel Comic Book Brain Trust, a steering committee that Fiege hated with every fiber of his existence. He had all these great ideas but since they weren’t in the comic books, the committee vetoed them. However, when Iger went to war with Ike Perlmutter, Kevin Feige ended up in charge of Marvel without fetter or restraint.

Avengers Endgame is supposed to be the last of the Phase III Marvel films but really it was the first of the Phase IV projects. The fundamentals had been thrown away. What made Hulk compelling was his Jekyll and Hyde story. Banner-Hulk was an unwanted end to that story. The consequences of the Snap and Blip weren’t thought out at all, they just threw in the Un-Snap because they didn’t know what else to do. The Girls Get It Done scene was ultra-cringe. Thanos had his entire character arc pitched into the garbage. Throwing away Steve Rogers made no sense. And Thor was going to have to find himself… Yet again.

It was the start of five years of legendary IP mismanagement rivaled only by Star Wars. I can’t think of anything that Feige got right in this period. His only real protection is that Bob Iger has tied himself too closely to Feige to dump him. When this all started with Ironman it had felt like it was building to something, which it was. But for five years it has just wandered around aimlessly. There was an attempt to make Kang the Conqueror a big bad but he was never going to rival Thanos. One domestic violence incident later and it ends with a whimper.

However, there was still a surprising amount of interest in the cast reveal. 245 million views. As a publicity stunt, I can’t really fault it. Also, it shows that unlike the Star Wars or Doctor Who fan bases, Marvel’s still shows some substantial indicators of still being alive. Deadpool and Wolverine was a one-off but it did rake in the kind of bucks Marvel used to on the regular.

Avengers Doomsday definitely feels like a last-chance movie. Since the one success they’ve had in the past five years was the aforementioned Deadpool and Wolverine, they’ve brought back as many of the 2000s X-Men as they could. Do you want to see Professor X die again? I’m pretty sure Fiege’s got you covered.

They’ve also brought in a lot of characters that either were never cared about or that Disney should be just plain embarrassed about. I had to look up a number of the actors’ names because I couldn’t remember who they played.

It was probably more interesting for the omissions. Doctor Stange won’t be there. Neither will Spider-Man, which isn’t a surprise since the new Spider-Man movie won’t be in theaters until July of 2026, (Doomsday is out in May of 26), and Peter Parker can’t make an appearance until then.

More disappointing is that the real Captain America will remain locked away. Also not a surprise as Marvel and (more importantly) Bob Iger are drastically over-committed to Sam Wilson as Cappie.

Doomsday will finally be the end of the hated multiverse years. It will also bring in the integration of Fox’s universe, but what are they getting out of that except a crop of actors who are all past their prime? If the past is anything to go by, they are being brought in order to be replaced by younger and more diverse characters no one has ever heard of.

The only real question here is, did Marvel hire Robert Downey Jr to play Doomsday for real or is this just a backdoor way of bringing back Tony Stark? If they are bringing back Ironman they are getting an actor who is in his sixties for an action role.

When Doomsday launches will have been nine years since Marvel was at its pinnacle. Fans would have been champing at the bit over this big of a roundup. However, this stunt-casting event has done nothing but show how far the House of Ideas has fallen.

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