15 hours ago
4
Avengers: Doomsday may still be almost a year off, but already it feels as if Hollywood has entered a new era of confidence marketing, built around a sort of ritualised roll-call of legacy characters who really need everyone to know they haven’t been retired yet. In the last few weeks we’ve had three almost completely pointless short trailers online, with another reportedly playing in cinemas ahead of Avatar: Fire and Ash. First there was Captain America cradling his baby, then Thor praying to his dear old dead omnipotent dad. This week we got our first proper look at the classic X-Men lineup in the new film, and there are suggestions that an encounter between the Fantastic Four’s The Thing and half of Wakanda is imminent.
Something weird is clearly happening. These aren’t teaser trailers in any meaningful sense, because these half-cocked, chord-drenched promotional entries tell us absolutely nothing about what is to come. Assembled fandom wants to know who Doctor Doom is in the new movie, and why he looks exactly like Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man (because if this is just stunt-casting there are going to be walkouts). We want to know how all the Fantastic Four and X-Men have suddenly turned up in the main Marvel timeline, when the last 17 years of these movies made no mention of them whatsoever. And we’d really like it not to just be explained away by … “the multiverse”.
But instead of telling us this, the Doomsday marketing team are giving us strange little promo reels designed – it appears – to function as proof that the Marvel blockbuster machinery still works. These are marginally better than that awful film about chairs that revealed who would be cast in the movie, but not by much.
What we do know is that Chris Evans’ Cap is back, but he comes with a whole lot of additional parental baggage. We are also aware that Chris Hemsworth’s Thor is somehow still struggling to live up to Odin’s expectations, even though Anthony Hopkins’ Allfather died three movies ago. As of this week’s online mini-trailer, it looks as though the X-Men have been through some sort of horrific apocalyptic experience in which half of them were knocked off by Sentinels (again). Meanwhile there is absolutely nothing new in the revelation that Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart remain the most marketable versions of Magneto and Professor X, despite having a combined age of 171. In the new X-Men promo, there’s no sense of mission or objective, just the darkling implication that something very bad has already happened. Like the other trailers, it isn’t an introduction so much as a headcount: the cinematic equivalent of checking who is still alive after a disaster. Reports suggest the next of these promo fragments will involve Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s The Thing meeting the Wakandans.
There is little point in actively searching for new promos online, though. Do that and you’ll be rewarded with a slurry of AI-generated “fan trailers”. It’s as if curiosity itself is being punished. The reality is that engaging with these early glimpses of Doomsday – our first sustained contact with the film beyond that moment in Fantastic Four when the supervillain briefly babysits Franklin Richards – has been like watching a stage magician whose routine consists of shuffling the cards, adjusting the lights and chatting to the crowd, all while very pointedly not doing the trick.
Doom will presumably be the apex figure who ties it all together, explains the arrival of all these mutant interlopers from other universes and finally turns this elaborate exercise in brand reassurance into something resembling a story. If not, this risks becoming a very long, boring movie about traumatised demigods spending their final waking aeons apologising profusely to assorted family members – or possibly meeting slightly different versions of themselves, and waiting patiently for Downey Jr to explain why he came back evil.
