THE ROAD TO DOOMSDAY continues as we finish up Phase One

I like the new Avengers: Doomsday trailer.

I was confused by the teaser trailers they released around Christmas, and I did not care one way or another about the first “real” trailer a month ago. Honestly, everything they’ve done in terms of marketing Doomsday has left me underwhelmed and indifferent until the D23 trailer they dropped just over a week ago, and it makes me wonder why they’ve handled the campaign this way. It feels like part of it is overconfidence on their part, like anything they put out is enough to get audiences excited. Considering the way the public has reacted to the last five or six years of Marvel, I think that is delusional. Avengers: Doomsday is anything but a sure thing at this point, and they need to acknowledge that.

The new trailer is entirely focused on establishing Doom as a character and a threat, and it gives us our best taste so far of how Robert Downey Jr. is approaching this iconic character who has, so far, eluded filmmakers almost completely. It’s wild how hard it’s been to get a compelling, interesting, intimidating version of Doctor Doom onscreen. The Tim Story films at least made an effort, but Josh Trank’s version is so weirdly wrong that it almost feels intentional. I have no idea what Noah Hawley’s big idea was for his standalone Doctor Doom film, but that feels like a very weird bullet dodged. At this point, the MCU has one shot at getting Doom right, because if this doesn’t work, I suspect there’s going to be some serious self-analysis happening at the studio. At this point, Avengers movies are the 800-pound gorilla of the MCU ecosystem, and they can’t afford to fumble the franchise.

If you haven’t seen the latest trailer yet, check it out:

It’s simple. It focuses entirely on establishing Doom both as a person and as a threat. I suspect I know the general shape of the film at this point, and what I’m curious about now is how they pull off what they’re going to try to do with this and Secret Wars as a one-two punch. I get the idea, but I think it’s an even harder needle to thread than Infinity War and Endgame were. It feels like the stakes are much higher behind the scenes, and that the stakes are going to have to be much higher onscreen as well. To justify making an Avengers film at this point, you need a genuinely cataclysmic threat, and it looks like they’re going to burn down the multiverse that they’ve spent at least five or six years building. It also seems important that this is the return of Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Robert Downey Jr., and Mark Ruffalo to one film for the first time since Endgame. They're putting the band back together. Marvel’s spent the entire time since Endgame introducing new characters, pushing franchise characters in new directions, and building out a sprawling, messy multiverse, and they’ve barely checked in with the characters who were originally the primary figures in this cinematic universe. I don’t think that was a mistake. Based on the conversations about this movie that I’ve seen and had over the last year, it seems clear that people genuinely want a return to the Marvel that used to be. That isn’t totally what Doomsday is going to be, but it’s as close as we’re ever going to get, and it raises the question of what it is that general audiences are going to expect when they sit down for a new Avengers movie this Christmas.

Not watching any of these films for a while has been interesting. Because I was covering this era of films as a journalist and I was also raising kids during the rise of Marvel, it felt like all of these films were on constant rotation, and right around 2020, that stopped. The last six years, I’ve seen the new things as they’ve come out, but I haven’t been rewatching everything and marinating in it in the same way, and I haven’t returned to the old stuff at all. It’s been interesting to watch these original films again with fresh eyes. Today’s trio of movies brings PHASE ONE to a close, and it’s clear that these six films, taken together, represent one complete thought.

By this point, we’ve already had one sequel, as we covered in part one of this series, which seems like Marvel trying to bank a sure thing before moving on to the three biggest risks of Phase One. We’re going to start today’s piece with two reprints back-to-back. First up is my review of Thor, and then it’s my Film Nerd 2.0 piece about taking the boys to see Thor. In the countdown to this movie’s release, I remember how skeptical my editor Greg Ellwood was. He felt like the public wasn’t going to follow Marvel into the more overtly comic-booky corners of the MCU, and every time I’d do a set visit, I’d come away convinced that they were making a real swing at it, and he’d tell me I was crazy. When you look at the movie landscape today, it’s hard to believe that less than twenty years ago, Thor was considered a risk because it might be “too weird.”