I am writing this article on Sunday, January 11th, 2026 (likely it’ll be posted in a couple days, so, don’t worry. I just like to work a bit ahead, if you will indulge me). In three-hundred forty-one days, Marvel Studios will unleash Avengers: Doomsday. Folks? I’m already sick of hearing about the movie. 

A literal year to the day of the release Marvel officially dropped the first of what I will assume is 176,962 teasers for the flick. We got to find out Steve Rogers would return. Yay.

Rest assured my TikTok feed was choked several days early with bootlegged versions that I swiped away from, in fear of AI slop. And somewhere around the seventeen-zillionth time I had to see the teaser reposted, or frame-by-frame broken down by the tidal wave of content creators, or otherwise speculated on… I waved the white flag.

And then the Thor trailer dropped.

And then the X-men trailer dropped.

I admit it. Yes, each time I’d wait to catch them on an official Marvel channel (again, to ensure that it wasn’t someone just using AI to fan-birth their own dumbass ideas), I would watch these teases… and to myself… speculate about plot points and things to come. I’d start getting hyped about the continuation of stories for these characters I’ve enjoyed across 37 films (!), and then it’d all come crashing down when I’d realized the movie isn’t coming out for eleven more months!

If this year-long trickle of teases are the Russo’s malevolent punishment to the world writ large that consumes information by the nano-second? I applaud the Doom-level villainy. I suspect, however, it’s the larger marketing machine itself still licking the wounds of Eternals flopping. 

Since the announcement that Robert Downey Jr. would be playing the titular ne’er-do-well, I’ve personally held a short-but-growing list of things I’d want to see occur when the movie makes way to the multi-plex. I’ll spare you a listicle to summarize it down to a singular point:

I need to know if the RDJ Doom is the Victor Von Doom of the movie 616 — and if so? There’s a metric ton of story that better pay it off. If what we’re getting is merely a variant? Then things are easily explained, and I’ll assume the focus is less on the how and more on the why. 

Semantics aside, with the over-saturation of the movie’s marketing already occurring so far from the actual debut? I’m wiping my hands of hype. All I’ll want is a fun action-filled romp with some of my favorite characters. I want big action set pieces. I want fun team-ups. I want Easter Eggs so deep I am forced to see the flick multiple times in the theater. But between now and December 18th? I don’t want a thousand more teasers. I don’t want sneak peaks, full trailers, BTS footage, leaks, spills, speculation, podcasts, or anything else permeating my mind before my butt is firmly in a slightly greasy seat in a darkened auditorium — awaiting the requisite twenty-eight minutes of pre-roll commercials, the eighteen minutes of trailers, and the over-indulgent four-minute commercial for the theater I actually am sitting in!

I am truly afraid that with this much time until the actual release Marvel is shooting itself in the foot. If these first few weeks are setting the tone? Audiences will walk into the theater knowing nearly every character, half of the plot points, and will have consumed ten-thousand hours of podcast and YouTube diatribes… leading to a film having zero chance of meeting expectations. Granted: Infinity War and Endgame were that good. And there’s certainly a part of me that thinks the Russos are just coy enough to make literally every “leak”, tease, trailer, and information all be a giant swerve. The film they’ll deliver would include literally none of the previously released material(s), and there’s just a big evil grin on Kevin Feige’s face as they roll the credits. 

The fact that I’ve already listened to people breaking down leaked images of Doom’s costume to determine movie plot points says everything. In light of it, I feel like the best bet is to simply say: I’m going to see the film. Until I’m actually viewing it? I want to know as little as possible because I don’t love the idea of consuming a piece of media that I’ve walked into with a punch-list a mile long of expectations — tied to a litany of official and unofficial content that has attempted to break things down it couldn’t possibly know ahead of time. It muddies the water to absorb a film as the piece of art it is. It’d be like watching someone paint a painting by way of a singular brush stroke being posted on Instagram a day at a time until it was completed. (I don’t have the heart to google if someone has already done that or not)

As it stands, Marvel-by-way-of-Disney is operating on a singular path to maximum profitability. And I’ll go so far as to say doing so will make it almost impossible for Avengers: Doomsday to actually maximize the money coming in. Because there’s a casual fan or perhaps an-already-exhausted fan who will have seen so much pre-release material that they’ll feel spending any actual money to consume the movie is wholly unnecessary. They’ll merely await someone spoiling it on social media, and only then make the call if they actually now need to see it. It’ll be bad enough when we get the film it’ll already be a toyline, an apparel line, a mobile game, an official podcast, an unofficial podcast, a Happy Meal tie-in, a Little Caesar pizza promotion, and a media blitz that will have lasted over an entire calendar year. 

I know I’m not quite allowed to be the old man yelling at clouds on this site (quiet, Mike.), but dag-nabbit… back in my day, you’d get one or two trailers, tops, two months away from the release. If you were lucky? You’d get three or four BTS blurry photos and an eight page expose in Wizard Magazine to handle any speculation. And that’s it! You’d go see the movie, and then enjoy the summer of Batman. 

I’ve ranted and raved enough. All the cranky Marvel fanboys have long gone from this article, and are actively trolling me on social media. That leaves only the true believers, and I want to spend my last paragraphs with you actually getting a little hyped before I shut it all down and patiently move on with my life for 11 more months. Indulge me. Here’s my take on everything thus far:

All the teasers released thus far seem to all be tied in or around children. We know from Fantastic Four that Doom has his metal mitts on young Franklin Richards. And we see in the Cap teaser a Rogers/Carter baby. And in the Thor teaser, the entire ode to Odin centers around Thor’s desire to protect Love, his adopted daughter. And while we don’t see any children specifically in the X-men trailer… we know that Charles Xavier’s school itself is equal parts an institute of learning and home to wayward orphans with slick abilities. Maybe I’m stretching a bit there, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. Were you to combine all of that synergy with the idea that Victor Von Doom né Tony Stark was himself a child without a proper upbringing? Well, those threads might knit quite the green sweater. The released photos of Doom’s cloak shows Captain Marvel’s logo, and Thor’s Mjolnir. Based on the prayer to Odin? My money says Thor is bested early on, not unlike the nerfing of Hulk in Infinity War to showcase Doom’s bonafides. We also know this will all lead towards Secret Wars, which itself heavily involves Dr. Doom gaining cosmic-level power in a gambit not unlike Thanos (in terms of reshaping reality and whatnot). In any event? It’s all exciting, and the notion that it’s all tied back to the very first hero the MCU got via Iron Man in 2008. 

Stay tuned, kiddos. We only have roughly 491,029 Tik-Tok videos to go until we’ll know the truth!