Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.Image via Marvel Studios.
By
Sam Barsanti
Published 14 minutes ago
Sam Barsanti has written about pop-culture for 10 years, and his work has appeared at The A.V. Club, Primetimer, IGN, and Collider. He has also contributed to the popular daily Hustle newsletter, which covers tech and startup news.
He'll happily talk to anyone about comic book movies (he thinks the MCU peaked with Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and giant robots (he thinks some of the Transformers movies are good), and he canonically exists in The CW's "Arrowverse" series of superhero shows.
Sam is also a published poet and horror writer, and his fiction work has appeared on The No Sleep Podcast.
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The Marvel Cinematic Universe was born 17 years ago when Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury first told Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark about the “Avenger Initiative” in Iron Man, and certain things about the series have become predictable: Nearly every post-credits scene, including that one, will eventually be rendered meaningless by a future movie. Gwyneth Paltrow will never remember which movies she was in. Moon Knight will never come back. But there’s one less-obvious MCU tradition that Marvel Studios is about to upend for Avengers: Doomsday by releasing the trailer earlier than ever before.
This is a big deal because Marvel has been so secretive about Doomsday that the only thing we definitely know about it — other than Robert Downey Jr. playing Doctor Doom — is the cast that was announced during that ridiculous chair stream. Is that the whole cast? Probably not, but we don’t know! Will the plot be a payoff to the Fantastic Four: First Steps stinger with Doctor Doom’s back? Maybe, but (again) history has shown that post-credits scenes tend to be canonical-ish at best. So this trailer will likely be our first chance to really see what’s going on with Avengers: Doomsday, and we don’t have to wait too long to see it.
When Does the 'Avengers: Doomsday' Trailer Come Out?
Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Chris Evans as Captain America, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, and Mark Ruffalo as The Hulk in The AvengersImage via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection
Earlier this month, Collider exclusively reported that the Avengers: Doomsday trailer will come out alongside Avatar: Fire and Ash (another Disney-backed mega-blockbuster) on December 19. That’s less than a month from whenever you’re reading this, but it’s also almost exactly one year before the movie actually comes out on December 18, 2026. That is the longest time between the release of the first trailer for an Avengers movie and the release of the Avengers movie, breaking a 14-year tradition in the MCU that had been trending the other way.
There were more than 200 days from the release of the first Avengers trailer to the release of The Avengers, then 189 days from the first trailer to the release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, then 150 days between the trailer and the release of Avengers: Infinity War, and just 140 days between the trailer and the release of Avengers: Endgame. At the risk of stating the obvious: Those numbers were all going down, and now the number has gone way up. There’s a likely reason for this change, but, unfortunately, it’s not one that MCU fans will feel too good about.
The MCU was getting bigger and bigger with every previous Avengers movie, meaning Marvel had less and less of a need to hype each movie up and get the fans excited. The studio probably sold a billion tickets with “Thanos will return” at the end of Infinity War, so it wasn’t desperately counting on the trailer for Endgame to remind people that it was coming. These days, though, the MCU is on shakier ground. Thunderbolts* made almost $400 million and First Steps made over $500 million, but those are relative disappointments when compared to the glory days. Disney and Marvel Studios need Doomsday to be another Earth-shaking hit, which is why Joe and Anthony Russo are coming back to direct, and it’s (probably) why the trailer is coming out a whole year before the movie does.
Avengers: Doomsday
Like Follow Followed Superhero Adventure Action Sci-Fi Release Date December 18, 2026 Director Anthony Russo, Joe Russo Writers Stephen McFeely, Michael Waldron, Jack Kirby, Stan LeeCast
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Chris Hemsworth
Thor
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Vanessa Kirby
Sue Storm / Invisible Woman
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Joseph Quinn
Johnny Storm / Human Torch
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Ebon Moss-Bachrach
Ben Grimm / The Thing
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Avengers: Doomsday
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