Marvel Studios’ livestream is revealing the Avengers: Doomsday cast, verrrry slowly

Marvel Studios went live at 11 a.m. EDT with a stream on Instagram and YouTube depicting… 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 is currently revealing further chairs one at a time at roughly 12-minute intervals, each new reveal marked by a sting of theme music from a Marvel movie, and each new chair featuring a new familiar name of an actor from the Marvel Cinematic Universe roster.

Turns out we’re seeing a slow-burn reveal of the cast for Marvel Studios’ upcoming event movie Avengers: Doomsday, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom and probably as many Avengers as Marvel can cram on screen. (But not Dr. Strange, apparently.)

As of the latest post update, we’ve seen chairs for the following:

• Chris Hemsworth (presumably returning as Thor)
• 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 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)

If the current pace continues, and the primary cast is as sprawling as it was for previous Avengers movies, we can expect this livestream to continue for hours, with fans mostly waiting to see whether supposedly retired MCU players like Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson have been lured back into the game. (The latter is 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 the real appeal in the stream and on social media is the raucous live-chat and run of memes, as Marvel fans with nothing to do but wait try to out-funny each other in expressing their impatience for the stream to move on. Fan reaction has predictably been split between excitement, frustration, interest, and vocal apathy, with something of a party atmosphere among people living in the chat, though we’ll see how far that extends as the livestream hits hour four or five.

This post is being updated live as the stream continues. Avengers: Doomsday is scheduled for release in 2026.