Doomsday for Marvel Studios?

I need to remind myself that the initial idea for these daily bulletin posts was to get myself back into writing every day and putting up quick thought pieces rather than lengthy articles, but as with everything I do, I’m prone to getting carried away. It’s also not intended to act as a movie news outpost either, but as it goes, Marvel Studios just announced a few things at the San Diego Comic Con yesterday. So let’s talk about the Marvel Burn Out for a little bit today.

The news that Ryan Gosling will be playing the MCU’s Ghost Rider in a film directed by Shawn Levy for release in 2028, and that Ryan Coogler is returning to helm Black Panther III with David Jonsson stepping into the role of T’Challa, feel very much to me like the recent trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. I’m not moved much in either direction. It all sounds… fine. As someone who probably stayed seated on the MCU bandwagon a little longer than most, I now acutely feel the superhero burn out that plenty of people were talking about years ago.

I was fully on board in 2012 with the release of The Avengers, a group of characters I knew absolutely nothing about and quickly caught up to speed with in the months leading up to its release. It all felt so exciting and larger than life, the beginning of a huge cinematic era that spawned an unprecedented amount of blockbuster smash hits. The decade of MCU’s reign at the top from 2008’s Iron Man to 2019’s Avengers: Endgame was unfathomably successful. Even a film like Captain Marvel (2019) which was maligned at the time and hasn’t seemed to have left much of a lasting impact since (I enjoyed it) made over a billion dollars worldwide. It seemed like nothing was going to stop this train.

But as Vision so sagely stated in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015): “a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.” And so, in 2026, after seven years of attempting to follow up and build upon the aftermath of Endgame, it feels like Marvel Studios are desperately trying to steer the ship back on course. In near enough the same amount of time that they laid out one of the most impressive multi-film runs of any franchise, there’s been a very disconnected feel to everything between Endgame and Doomsday. Now I will say, I’ve actually fallen behind on the MCU, so maybe my view on that is misinformed. I used to never miss a Marvel film in the cinema but I’ve now yet to see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022), Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), The Marvels (2023), Captain America: Brave New World (2025), Thunderbolts* (2025) or The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025). I’ve not heard any kind of effusive praise for any of them.

Having kids doesn’t help as cinema trips are few and far between these days, but the knowledge that these will all end up on Disney+ within a few months doesn’t help the urgency of making the extra effort to go out and see them either. That’s a whole other conversation though. I’m behind on the streaming shows too, but have greatly enjoyed a lot of them, especially Wandavision (2021), Loki (2021), Hawkeye (2021), Moon Knight (2022), Ms. Marvel (2022), and even She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022). It does get to a point though, where it just feels like too much and the field becomes way too saturated.

And leading into Doomsday, some of my favourite new characters are simply not part of the equation at all. At least on the surface, who knows what the film will actually reveal in term of plot developments and unannounced characters. I will catch up as best as I can before December, though I’m definitely going to prioritise Dune: Part Three this winter. Of course it is an Avengers movie, and I do love the pomp and circumstance that comes along with that… but seeing the reliance the film seems to hold in a) bringing back Robert Downey Jr., b) bringing back the original X-Men (again), c) bringing back Captain America who had one of the most perfect sendoffs I’ve ever seen, and d) seemingly fast tracking The Fantastic Four team into relevance… I’m skeptical.

It’s very telling that the only thing that would’ve really got me out of my seat with that Doomsday trailer would’ve been a reveal of say… Tobey Maguire. Since Endgame there has been maybe an over-reliance on that kind of nostalgia bait, and look, it totally worked in some cases. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) and Deadpool and Wolverine (2024) were a blast! And mostly because of the way they brought back iconic actors to their old superhero roles. But now we run into the tricky territory of a “Multiverse Saga” which places unnecessary expectations on the audience. So will Marvel Studios be able to deliver, and after the huge shift they had to make along the way (cancelling Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, bringing back the Russo brothers etc.), pull off some kind of meaningful conclusion/reset to the MCU? There has been talk of “starting fresh” after Secret Wars, which does give the impression that they’re hanging on for dear life, hoping to just get this phase of films tied up and finished.

There’s only so far you can take, well, anything? Kevin Feige has spoken this week about having planned out projects until beyond 2040 and that feels a bit naive… but he wasn’t “born yesterday”, so… we’ll see I suppose. I think I would’ve far preferred, and respected, a bit more bravery in approaching this next Avengers film. Still, it’s show business after all, and there’s a bottom line to everything. It feels like audiences in 2026 are flocking to films and ideas more original (ish) and tangible though, with bankable tentpole releases like Moana and Supergirl bombing. Relatively speaking anyway.

Captain America calling Thor’s hammer Mjolnir to his hand at the end of the Avengers: Doomsday trailer was so underwhelming, a complete inverse of the iconic moment in Endgame that still gives me goosebumps when I recall seeing it play out in the cinema. Maybe there’s a method to the madness though. Perhaps there’s more than meets the eye. Or not. Kevin Feige was also interviewed after the Hall H panel and defended the importance of Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom. He reasoned that the build up of Thanos leading into Avengers: Infinity War (2018) was mostly in the audience’s heads, that we barely saw him before that.

Which feels a bit disingenuous when the set-up for the Infinity Stones was laid out in The Avengers (2012) and literally fleshed out in every subsequent film, along with Thanos pulling the strings in the shadows and the general accepted knowledge that he was hunting down those stones. Maybe I’ve missed a grander thread in the films I’ve not seen in the past few years that set-up Doom, but somehow I doubt it, if anything because of the way the plans had to change along the way. Which is fine, this shit happens when you’re juggling billions of dollars across dozens of film and TV projects, but the downplaying of how well they built towards Thanos and the past two Avengers films feels a bit insulting to our intelligence.

I was recently watching an interview with the visual effects maestro Phil Tippett on the Sinbad Trilogy blu-ray set from Indicator. He was talking about his mentor Ray Harryhausen and his stop motion animation work, noting that a lot of trends in filmmaking seem to last about thirty years. From Harryhausen’s career in creating legendary stop motion monster effects in films, to even the genre of the western in its heyday, and his own career too, Tippett found that three decades was the typical stretch of longevity you can expect in this business.

While there were superhero films (and successful ones) throughout the latter half of the 20th century, it really wasn’t until the birth of the MCU in 2008 that the comic book movie became the absolute dominant worldwide cinematic attraction. It already feels like the bloom is somewhat off that rose, and maybe Kevin Feige shouldn’t be hedging his bets too much on what he can cook up in the 2040s…

Luke