Avengers: Doomsday

The Russo brothers return to Marvel for the first Avengers movie since Endgame, with Robert Downey Jr. back on the payroll playing Victor von Doom instead of Tony Stark. The announced ensemble is enormous: Chris Hemsworth, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Vanessa Kirby, Pedro Pascal, Simu Liu, Florence Pugh, Letitia Wright, Paul Rudd, Lewis Pullman, Tom Hiddleston, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen reprising their X-Men roles, plus the Fantastic Four cast and a parade of others. Release has slid from May 2026 to December 2026. First trailer dropped in July 2026 and gave us Doom's voiceover plus a Steve Rogers tease.

There is one, honestly. The Russos actually know how to shoot ensemble action, and Endgame proved they can land a crowd scene without turning it into mud. Hemsworth has been loose and funny since Ragnarok and still is. McFeely and Markus aren't writing this one, which some fans count as a loss and others count as oxygen. Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby bring real theater training the recent Marvel bench has been missing. If you've been waiting a decade to see Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen back in a Marvel frame, that itch is about to get scratched.

The trailer tells on the movie. Doom's accent splits rooms. Some fans heard "Slavic menace," others heard "RDJ doing a bit," and the discourse hasn't settled. The VFX in the first look got flagged repeatedly as rubbery and unfinished, which is a bad sign for a tentpole announced three years ago. The cast list reads like a hostage inventory. Twenty-plus named heroes means nobody gets a scene longer than ninety seconds, and the recent MCU track record on that math is Multiverse of Madness and The Marvels, not Infinity War. Marvel is also asking you to accept Downey as a different character in the same franchise, which is a swing you can admire while still noticing it's a swing.

If you've seen every Disney+ Marvel show, you'll probably have a decent time and understand who half these people are. If you tapped out after Endgame, you'll spend two hours wondering why the Thunderbolts are hugging the X-Men. Fans of the comics' Secret Wars run have a reason to show up for the Doom of it all. Everyone else is looking at a lavishly expensive crossover that assumes homework. Think Rise of Skywalker energy: fan service doing the heavy lifting while the script jogs to keep up.

SLOP is the call because the signals point at execution problems, not ambition problems. Unfinished-looking VFX this close to release, a lead performance already getting workshopped on Twitter, a cast so bloated the Russos will have to cut around people in post, and a studio that spent 2024 and 2025 publicly admitting it overextended. The pitch is maximalist spectacle. The delivery looks like damage control with a budget. Downey as Doom is a marketing idea first and a character choice second, and that's the whole movie's problem in one casting. Big noise, thin middle.