When Avengers: Infinity War was released in 2018, it felt a little bit like every movie star was in it. There were entire conversations about the movie’s insane billing order, which included so many famous people that agents must have spent months negotiating whether Don Cheadle would be 16th or 23rd.
On March 26, Marvel unveiled the cast for Avengers: Doomsday, the first Avengers movie since Endgame hit theaters in 2019. The impact was…quieter. There are certainly still plenty of interesting actors in the cast — Florence Pugh! Paul Rudd! Chris Hemsworth! Robert Downey Jr.! A slew of people who were in X-Men movies 20 years ago!
Marvel made the announcement in a livestream that slowly panned across a series of cast chairs, each of which had a different name on it. The stream was meant to build momentum as each new name was revealed, but the actual result was a reminder that Marvel is not what it once was. This franchise, which dominated Hollywood for over a decade to such an extent that it felt like nothing would ever topple it, is weak, and that livestream is all the proof you need.
For one thing, the movie is missing many of Marvel’s key players from recent years, which wasn’t really the case with Infinity War. What’s more crucial, though, is that the cast members who appear to be the anchors of this cast are, let’s face it, playing characters viewers are much less attached to than the ones that anchored Infinity War.
Hemsworth is the longest-serving member of the cast other than Downey Jr., who is playing a new character in the film. Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bacharach are part of the cast, and we haven’t met their version of the Fantastic Four at all yet. Paul Rudd is great, but his Ant-Man is, insanely, enough, a legacy character at this point.
Infinity War and Endgame felt like the culmination of something. It was an insane attempt to bring together a half-dozen different strands of stories into a single narrative, and miraculously, it mostly worked.
This time, the cast of characters feels like a hodge-podge, an assemblage of people who were willing to take Marvel’s money and show up for work. It’s possible and perhaps even likely, that the creative team behind this movie will have a good justification for the characters who are absent within the world of this story. But the franchise has not carefully built momentum toward this point the way they did the last time. Instead, it feels like they’ve dumped all of their toys on the floor and figured out which ones still have batteries.
The inclusion of Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, and much of the original cast of X-Men only reinforces this point. While we have no idea what role these actors will play in the movie, the X-Men franchise has slowly sapped its audience of all the goodwill they had for that franchise over 20 years. Marvel’s new control over the characters was supposed to revitalize the characters, and the best way to do that likely would have been to just start from scratch. Instead, we’re going to get the kind of cheap nostalgia that Marvel has become reliant on in the years since Endgame.
Instead of taking advantage of the relationships the franchise has carefully built up between the audience and their own characters, Marvel has moved toward taking advantage of simple nostalgia. Remember how great those Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies were, and how much you like Andrew Garfield? John Krasinski should be Mr. Fantastic, so we’ll show you what that’s like! This is the second time Patrick Stewart has appeared in a Marvel project as a character he last played for real in Logan.
Marvel still has the capability to make genuinely interesting stuff. It’s a massive studio, and you don’t get 10 years of dominance by accident. In recent years, though, their operation has faltered for reasons both within and outside of their control.
Avengers: Doomsday could be great. It could be the start of a new era of dominance for a studio that seems to be almost entirely lacking an identity in the post-Endgame era. It’s also possible, though, that the movie could fall flat, and signal the end of a franchise that was once so omnipresent it felt like it might never go away. All good things come to an end, and whether you were happy about Marvel’s dominance or wish it had never happened, it might be over in the next 18 months.
