Marvel’s big cast reveal for Avengers: Doomsday earlier this week was like something out of an avant garde endurance piece curated by Andy Warhol, a five-hour extended live stream during which a row of empty director’s chairs stood solemnly under the harsh glare of studio lighting. The names kept coming with metronomic regularity: Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Anthony Mackie (Captain America), Paul Rudd (Ant-Man), Letitia Wright (Black Panther), Simu Liu (Shang-Chi) – each new label slapped on to the backrest by some unseen intern just off camera. This was internet performance art as corporate spectacle.
Five solid hours of vacant upholstery, culminating in Robert Downey Jr, who will play Doctor Doom in the new film, appearing just long enough to gesture for silence, as if warning the universe never to speak again of the utter boredom of what they had just witnessed. The sheer, glacially paced anticlimax of it all was so profound it almost achieved a state of absurdist nirvana.
If we did learn anything from this hyper-extended cinematic seance, it was that the studio hasn’t yet decided whether Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch or Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel will be taking a bow in the first new Avengers film in six years, but has inexplicably decided to bring back almost the entire main cast of the 2000s X-Men movies, including Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, Ian McKellen’s Magneto, James Marsden’s Cyclops, Kelsey Grammer’s Beast and even Rebecca Romijn’s take on Mystique. Moreover we’re also getting Channing Tatum’s Gambit, despite the latter only ever having starred in imaginary films conjured by hastily written press releases buried deep within the pages of Variety (bar that weird bit in Deadpool & Wolverine).
Whether these inter-studio interlopers – the X-Men used to be part of 20th Century Fox’s superhero pantheon before Disney bought it – will end up as more than glorified cameos remains to be seen. Either way, it’s certainly a strange mix of seen-it-all-before and not-quite-sure-who-these-people-are. The Fantastic Four (Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn) will also be taking part, as will the entire cast of Thunderbolts (Sebastian Stan, Florence Pugh, Wyatt Russell, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen and Lewis Pullman), despite the fact that we’ve not yet seen either of these films.
By the time the Russo brothers actually get this thing into cinemas in 2026, we’ll have a much better idea of whether this sprawling nostalgia-bait mashup is a masterstroke or the cinematic equivalent of throwing darts at a board covered in headshots. In the meantime, Marvel is floundering around in the dark, like a drunken octopus trying to put on a sweater.
The bright side is that the Russos, despite doing nothing of note since Endgame, have been here before. We’re about to find out whether their remarkable Avengers double header was a cosmic fluke fuelled largely by the immaculately planned movies that preceded it, or whether they’ve genuinely cracked the code for making three-hour character pile-ups that somehow feel like tightly choreographed cinematic symphonies.
Perhaps this intensely wearisome live stream thing was, after all, just a cunning ruse to bore us all into extreme tedium before the real spectacle begins. Maybe, just maybe, Doomsday will be the greatest multiversal orgy of shameless nostalgia since No Way Home. And if it’s not looking that way yet, all Marvel needs to do is bring back Lou Ferrigno’s shirtless, green Hulk and Mickey Rourke’s Ivan Vanko and we’ll probably all forget we ever doubted them.