Each of Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday reveals made me a little less excited for Avengers: Doomsday

On Wednesday morning, Marvel Studios kicked off an agonizingly slow, exceedingly fun casting announcement for Avengers: Doomsday. Marvel’s five-and-a-half-hour livestream panned across chairs with actors’ names on their backs to let us know which heroes would be appearing in the next Avengers movie, showing off a new reveal roughly every 12 minutes. 

Unfortunately, as annoying as a five-plus-hour PR stunt livestream sounds on paper, I had a good time watching it. Each new reveal felt exciting, and it became a fun little habit to check on the stream every 15 minutes, then dash over to social media and group chats to see how everyone was reacting to the latest name revealed, whether it was someone expected (like Anthony Mackie) or a surprise (like Kelsey Grammer). But by the time the camera hit Patrick Stewart’s chair, nearly four hours into the stream, I was getting awfully weary — not of the livestream announcement gimmick, but of Avengers: Doomsday itself. 

Don’t get me wrong: I’m excited for the next set of Avengers movies, and I’ve been a proponent of Doctor Doom joining the cast since before Disney announced, then scrapped, Kang as the Multiverse Saga’s villain. But seeing that infinite row of chairs, each subtly offset from the last by just a few inches, I could really feel all the ways in which Doomsday writer-directors Anthony Russo and Joe Russo might be biting off a little more than they can chew. 

Doom might be Marvel’s greatest overall character, and he’s certainly its best villain. Doom’s stories across the years have had tragedy and pathos. He has a multiverse-dominating ego, and the power to carry out that ambition. In any given story, he’s equally likely to try to kill the Avengers or help them take out a rival supervillain, just to open up space for his own world-conquering schemes in the future.

In other words, Doctor Doom deserves plenty of time during his own set of movies to bask in the glow of the spotlight and be the malevolent star of the show — especially considering the dump truck full of money that Disney must have backed up to Robert Downey Jr.’s house to get him to put on the mask. But it’s hard to imagine Doom getting the time he needs when Doomsday is also tasked with bringing all these goddamned X-Men into the MCU. 

During Wednesday’s show, Marvel played things cool at first. The stream’s producers let the camera pan over Kelsey Grammer’s chair, seemingly confirming that The Marvels’ end-credits scene would have a role to play in the action. Then, eventually, the camera let us in on a few more secrets: Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming, and Channing Tatum are all joining the cast, too. 

Suddenly, we’re staring down the barrel of half a dozen or more X-Men characters getting introduced to the MCU in this very movie, along with Doom. For any shortcomings Avengers: Infinity War might have had, it was mostly working with a cast of characters that had each been established by one or more of their own movies by that point. Doomsday’s cast, by comparison, mostly consists of members of the Thunderbolts and the Fantastic Four, two teams whose movies haven’t been released yet, along with members of the X-Men who haven’t even been teased in the MCU yet — and who, in some cases, haven’t been in an X-Men movie since 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. That just seems like too much for one movie to handle.

I’m worried that at some point, in throwing together so many characters, multiverses, and cinematic franchises, Avengers: Doomsday is going to feel more like a puzzle designed to fit all these things into place than like a film in its own right. After all, if you’re going to make a movie about bringing this many different characters into contact, it certainly seems like the introductions will take so long that there’s hardly going to be room for team-ups or fights. 

But maybe none of this will matter much in the end, anyway. Co-director and co-writer Joe Russo told Omelete that while Avengers: Endgame was a definitive ending for a certain MCU era, Doomsday and its follow-up, 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars, are intended to be the starting point of something new. So maybe Wednesday’s parade of casting announcements was mostly just a list of characters who are going to get killed off in Doomsday’s first 10 minutes to make room for the new MCU. If that’s not what happens, I hope Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom at least demands the spotlight he deserves.