Avengers Doomsday full trailer: Superheroes united in Marvel’s make-or-break blockbuster

Marvel really needs Avengers: Doomsday to work.

The studio hasn’t had a proper commercial hit for two years, not since Deadpool and Wolverine in July 2024.

Its three most recent releases – Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four: First Steps – were creatively fine, to varying degrees, but underwhelmed when it came to the box office, and the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day is more Sony’s movie than it is Disney’s.

So, yeah, Avengers: Doomsday needs to be a gargantuan success.

In part because there are some wild numbers being thrown around regarding its production budget, rumoured to be as high as $US400 million (Robert Downey Jr and Chris Evans, but especially RDJ, ain’t coming back without a massive payday), which would put its break-even close to a billion dollars.

But also because Marvel needs the story of a definitive win. It needs to turn the narrative around, and if Doomsday isn’t going to be the one to do it, then what will?

The film is still five months from release but the studio has today dropped the first full trailer, featuring the marquee stars of its large ensemble cast.

It had previously teased the movie with four short, character-based clips, but this is the first look at Downey Jr in his complete Doctor Doom gear (he was in a post-credits scene in Fantastic Four but was shown only from the back) and had characters from different parts of the MCU interacting with each other.

Today’s trailer has the job of emphasising that Doomsday is an event movie, highlighting it’s A-list cast as well as the different elements of this narrative universe, hoping to reignite the excitement of previous Avengers films which brought together the likes of Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Hulk and Hawkeye to start, before that roster was expanded.

The united heroes we see in this Doomsday trailer include some of the pre-Covid Avengers (Chris Hemsworth, Paul Rudd, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan) and the Thunderbolts/New Avengers gang (Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Lewis Pullman, Hannah John-Kamen and Wyatt Russell).

You also see Wakandan characters (Winston Duke, Letitia Wright, Tenoch Huerta Mejia), the Fantastic Four (Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn) and Shang-Chi (Simu Liu), Gambit (Channing Tatum), Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston).

For fans of the 2000s-era X-Men movies, the return of some of its core cast have been a big selling point, and we see Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellan), Scott Summers (James Marsden) and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn).

That’s a lot of people in addition to Downey Jr and Evans, and that’s just the ones featured in this trailer, not the whole list. Not everyone will have been paid as much as Downey Jr, but don’t think for a second that those star salaries (Stewart and McKellan weren’t turning up for peanuts, nor should they) wasn’t a huge chunk of the budget.

There’s also the seriousness of the trailer’s tone to really declare that is going to be weighty movie. The opening voiceover line, speculated to be Downey Jr’s Doom with a maybe European accent, is “something is coming”.

Then you have Thor intoning, “I’ve fought with many warriors in my time. They were far stronger than all of us put together and they died. They died facing enemies and threats that scared me far less than this one. Everything that they sacrificed will be for nothing if we do not stand together.

“Put aside your petty squabbles and presume nothing except this. If you return, you will return as brothers and sisters. But mark my words, we’re going to need a miracle.”

That miracle comes in the form of Evans’ Steve Rogers who left this timeline at the end of Avengers: Endgame to live out his life in the past with his true love, Peggy Carter. But there he is now, appearing in front of Thor and approving he’s really him with the one act that no one can cheat, command of Thor’s hammer.

The video ends with the familiar strains of composer Alan Silvestri’s original Avengers theme from the 2012 movie.

There is still the mystery of whether Downey Jr’s Doom is an alternate universe version of Tony Stark, who has died in the main timeline, or if he really is just playing an entirely different character, and we will possibly not even see his face from under the mask.

Unlike in the closing years of the 2010s when the superhero genre, but especially Marvel movies, were printing money like the party was never going to end, it’s been a challenge to reverse the decline in interest.

There have been breakout successes (Guardians of the Galaxy 3, The Batman, Black Panther 2, Deadpool & Wolverine – Ryan Reynolds just confirmed that another Deadpool movie is coming) but for the most part, the post-Covid era has been a challenge for the formerly formidable genre.

Marvel has invested a lot in Doomsday, recalling not just the previous era’s topline stars but also filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo, who helmed Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame and three Captain America movies, and screenwriter Christopher McFeely.

But the biggest capital it’s expending is its cultural capital.

Some of the complaints of the post-Endgame MCU movies have been that audiences haven’t been able to invest in the new(er) characters that were introduced, and if the return of Downey Jr and Evans isn’t enough to bring fans back, then Marvel would have to rewrite its whole strategy.

If Doomsday does work, it’s a double-sided victory. On the one hand, it can leverage that momentum into its next phase, especially for those characters such as the Fantastic Four that will be foundational to that (and not enough people saw the standalone movie).

But the flip side is how sustainable is it to keep going back to the actors who were part of the MCU launch almost two decades ago now, and a massive box office will only reinforce an approach underpinned by fear and retreat.

Come December, we’ll see what happens – and let’s not forget that Doomsday has another rival: Dune Part 3, which is releasing on the exact same day.

Avengers: Doomsday is in cinemas on December 17