Every reveal from Marvel Studios’ five-hour livestream of the Avengers: Doomsday cast

So… the X-Men are joining the Avengers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, apparently, though it remains to be seen exactly how. Marvel Studios went live at 11 a.m. EDT on Wednesday with a livestream on Instagram and YouTube that was eventually revealed as a casting announcement for 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday, the Russo brothers’ continuation of the MCU franchise. There were a lot of familiar names in the mix, but the biggest surprise was the return of Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, and several other familiar names from the 2000s’ X-Men movies.

The livestream opened on a canvas director’s chair with Chris Hemsworth’s name on it. The studio’s official account on X posted the stream with no context except the word “ANNOUNCEMENT” and the text “take a seat.” The stream ran for five and a half hours, with the camera panning to reveal further chairs bearing further familiar names at roughly 12-minute intervals, each one accompanied by a sting of theme music from a relevant Marvel movie. The stream ended at 4:30 p.m. EDT after revealing Robert Downey Jr. sitting in the final chair in a long row.

This initially mysterious slow-burn reveal laid out the initial key cast for Marvel Studios’ upcoming event movie Avengers: Doomsday, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom and as many Avengers and X-Men as Marvel can contract and cram on screen. Most notably missing: Tom Holland as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, any of the cast of Eternals or The Marvels, or Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr. Strange. (Though we already knew he likely won’t be in it — unless there’s a new reveal coming.) The ultra-slow pacing was reminiscent of HBO’s 2017 stunt reveal of the Game of Thrones season 7 premiere date, where more than 100,000 fans turned up to a livestream for more than an hour just to watch a large block of ice slowly melting to reveal the date.

Over the course of this extremely slow and teasing process, we saw chairs for the following actors:

• Chris Hemsworth (Thor from the various Thor and Avengers movies)
• Vanessa Kirby (set to play Sue Storm, aka Invisible Woman, in Fantastic Four: Next Steps later this year)
• Anthony Mackie (fresh off his run as Captain America in Captain America: Brave New World)
• Sebastian Stan (as Bucky Barnes, aka Winter Soldier, who showed up for a cameo in Brave New World and will co-star in Thunderbolts* in May)
• Letitia Wright (Shuri from the Black Panther movies)
• Paul Rudd (Scott Lang/Ant-Man, who got his own silly mini-chair, because Ant-Man shrinks, see?)

• Wyatt Russell (John Walker/US Agent, from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, also in Thunderbolts*)
• Tenoch Huerta Mejía (Namor from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever)
• Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm/The Thing from Fantastic Four: First Steps)
• Simu Liu (Shang-Chi from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings)
• Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova from Black Widow, Hawkeye, and the upcoming Thunderbolts*)
• Kelsey Grammer (Hank McCoy/Beast in the post-credits stinger for The Marvels)
• Lewis Pullman (Robert Reynolds/Sentry from Thunderbolts*)
• Danny Ramirez (the new Falcon, seen in Captain America: Brave New World)
• Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm/Human Torch from Fantastic Four: Next Steps)
• David Harbour (Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian from Black Widow and Thunderbolts*)
• Winston Duke (M’Baku from the Black Panther movies)
• Hannah John-Kamen (Ava Starr/Ghost in Ant-Man and the Wasp and Thunderbolts*)
• Tom Hiddleston (Loki in the Thor and Avengers movies and Loki)
• Patrick Stewart (Professor X in the Fox X-Men movies and in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) — notably introduced with the old X-Men animated opening theme song that’s become one of the most recognizable musical stings for X-Men material throughout Marvel
• Ian McKellan (Magneto in the Fox X-Men movies)
• Alan Cumming (apparently returning as Nightcrawler from his one X-Men outing in X2: X-Men United)
• Rebecca Romijn (Mystique from X-Men, X2, and X-Men: The Last Stand)
• James Marsden (Cyclops from the initial X-Men movie trilogy and, briefly, X-Men: Days of Future Past)
• Channing Tatum (Gambit in Deadpool & Wolverine), whose appearance opens up a lot of questions
• Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic in Fantastic Four: First Steps)
• Robert Downey Jr., who we knew was in the film, and who turned up as the final reveal, to gesture theatrically back to the line of chairs behind him

Marvel fans reacting in chat and on social media were loudly curious about whether supposedly retired MCU players like Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson had been lured back into the game. (The latter was an extreme long-shot, given Johansson’s recent interview where she emphasized that her MCU character, Black Widow, is dead, and that Marvel fans should move on.) But no, neither of them appeared in the cast rundown.

For much of the livestream’s run, the real appeal was the raucous live-chat and the run of memes on social media, as Marvel fans waiting for hours tried to out-funny each other in expressing their impatience for the stream to move on. Fan reaction over Marvel’s methodology was predictably split between excitement, frustration, interest, and vocal apathy, with something of a party atmosphere among people living in the chat.

But with this full lineup revealed, we now enter the phase where fans pick apart the choices and theorize about what exactly this movie will look like, given this specific set of people coming together, and given all the Marvel characters who are still alive and active in the MCU, but have been left out of this particular crossover. Expect the theorizing to continue until 2026, when Avengers: Doomsday is scheduled for release.