Avengers Doomsday Is Nostalgia Bait, But You're Still Going To Watch It

The first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday is finally here, and it’s pretty much what I expected. I won’t lie that I felt myself getting goosebumps upon glimpsing familiar characters like Thor and Steve Rogers reuniting for another epic battle, while Robert Downey Jr’s take on Doctor Doom, no matter how cynical his casting might be, is incredibly sinister.

But Doomsday is far from the global event that Infinity War and Endgame becane, which were the result of Marvel releasing dozens of excellent films throughout the course of a decade, leading to a satisfying conclusion millions of us cared about. It made billions and earned it. In comparison, Doomsday feels like it’s trying to make us forget about the past five years of mediocre TV shows and movies that followed in the wake of Endgame. Superhero cinema is in a very different place right now.

No matter how many iconic heroes from past and present you stuff into the trailer, no matter how huge a threat you try and make Doctor Doom out to be, when it’s largely coming out of nowhere it’s difficult to care. Fantastic Four: The First Steps and Thunderbolts are striving to single-handedly sell us on this movie alongside myriad returning faces fueled by nostalgia.

It’s the same reason why I disliked Spider-Man: No Way Home so much. It wasn’t a decent film in its own right, instead relying on the return of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield as their respective wall crawlers, even leaving small windows of silence for us to clap like seals. But Spider-Man continues to be hugely popular despite superhero fatigue, and this combo of familiarity and nostalgia is precisely what Doomsday is depending on for its own relevance.

Chances are it will be a well-made and thrilling blockbuster that I’ll be keen to see, but the circumstances of its existence feel like an admittance of failure by Kevin Feige and friends.

Marvel’s Streaming Experiment Was A Catastrophic Failure

Just like Star Wars, which has also turned into a bit of a joke in recent years, Marvel was used by Disney to spearhead the launch of its streaming service and deliver content that convinced people to subscribe and stick around. Some of these early shows were great, such as WandaVision, Loki, and Moon Knight.

But others were serviceable at best or just plain terrible at worst, while there was so much to get through that most people who were once infatuated with the MCU simply didn’t bother. Many assumed Endgame was wrapping up all the loose ends and considered it the finale to a massive story. Expecting viewers to keep following the story through these shows and films after the fact wasn’t reasonable, especially when extra costs were involved, and we’d just come out of COVID.

As a culture critic, it’s my job to keep on top of popular culture, and even I couldn’t muster up the strength to watch every single episode of She-Hulk. It just wasn’t very good, while very little of these shows felt relevant to the future in a way that wasn’t going to be nullified when Marvel saw fit. Kevin Feige touched on this in a recent interview when asked about why the Blade film set to star Mahershala Ali never got off the ground despite having so much potential.

“We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique,” Feige explained. “It fell into the time when we started pulling back and saying, ‘Only accept insanely great.’ And it wasn’t ‘insanely great’ at the time. We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can have a good script and make it a great script through production. We didn’t feel confident that we could do that on ‘Blade,’ and we didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”

Feige is basically admitting here that Marvel reached a point of oversaturation in recent years, and it was no longer putting out films or shows that felt like true events that provided us with plenty of reasons to get excited. They were putting out content for the pure sake of content, and the second you cross that line you risk people not caring. And that’s precisely what happened. I used to talk with family and friends about every single new Marvel film in the run-up to release, and after we’d watched it, often trying to guess where things may go next and how it would influence the events of Infinity War and Endgame.

But That Won’t Stop Avengers: Doomsday From Being A Hit

In the modern day, Avengers: Doomsday feels like a desperate attempt to recapture our collective attention and restore the status quo before hurtling towards Secret Wars. We’re also set to receive a version of Endgame with several minutes of new footage, which I can imagine will bridge the gaps between Doomsday and Endgame while ensuring viewers will get the minimal knowledge of everything to get invested. Yes, there’s Fantastic Four: First Steps, Thunderbolts, and all the aforementioned shows, but I bet writing work has been done to streamline their relevance for newcomers. Besides, both of those films were successful in comparison to the shows fewer people engaged with.

Judging from the 30+ million views the Doomsday trailer has gained on YouTube alone in its first 24 hours, there is still a thirst for superhero media. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is likely to be a huge success as well, but I’ve always viewed this character as operating on his own logic rather than being a part of the MCU, and he will be around long after it has faded away. But all the trends are leaning towards millions of people turning up to watch Doomsday on opening day, whether it’s to see familiar faces, viewing it as the true follow-up to Endgame or merely satiating their own curiosity. People care, whether it’s nostalgia bait or not.

If anything, Marvel is actively counting on that audience showing up as it responds directly to the malaise of the streaming era. A constant line of TV shows is being left behind as this last-ditch attempt is made to get the cinematic universe back on track. I’m not sure Kevin Feige is able to keep this up forever once Secret Wars has arrived, and it’ll need to start fresh sooner or later, but for now, it has a couple of billion dollar successes on its hands.

I’ll be there in my seat with popcorn in hand, so I know I’m part of the problem, but Doomsday feels like a bold admission of defeat, as it is the start of something new. A commitment to the future which simply cannot exist without clinging onto the past and coming to terms with its own fleeting identity. You’ll get goosebumps, but not much else when all is said and done.

Cast

• Chris Hemsworth Thor
• Vanessa Kirby Sue Storm / Invisible Woman
• Joseph Quinn Johnny Storm / Human Torch
• Ebon Moss-Bachrach Ben Grimm / The Thing