Marvel has finally released the first full-length trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, and the studio would like you to know that everything you love is about to be stepped on by a man in a green cloak. The footage dropped earlier today after roughly two years of leaks, rumors, and grown adults arguing about set photos of a chair, and it turns out the actual trailer is somehow bigger than the speculation. That should be illegal, and yet here we are.
Take a look:
If you can’t watch it, the trailer opens with the X-Men, who are apparently done easing into this universe and have decided to show up right as the sky starts doing something deeply unsettling as the mutants brace for what the trailer frames as a full cataclysm, the kind of event that makes Charles Xavier put on his serious face, which is admittedly most of his faces. There is a real “we survived our own franchise and now this” energy to the whole sequence but honestly, they have earned the exhaustion.
From there, the trailer pivots to the largest game of superhero speed dating ever assembled. The Thunderbolts, the Fantastic Four, and whatever is left of the Avengers are all shown coming together, presumably after several meetings about who gets to stand in the middle of the group shot. Marvel is selling this as the heroes facing a more dangerous foe than anything they have encountered before, which is a bold claim to make to an audience that watched half the universe get dusted, but the trailer makes a disturbingly good case. That case is named Victor von Doom.
Yes, the trailer gives us our first real look at Doom himself, and the marketing team clearly understood the assignment, because they saved the best moment for him. Thor, God of Thunder, wielder of Stormbreaker, a man who once took a full blast from a dying star to the chest, swings his axe directly at Doom. Doom blocks it. With a finger. One finger.
Stormbreaker, the weapon specifically forged to kill Thanos, gets stopped by a single armored digit like Thor is a toddler swinging a pool noodle. Somewhere, Thanos is watching this from the afterlife and quietly re-assessing his workout routine.
It is the kind of power move that tells you everything about how this movie views its villain. Thanos had to snap and Doom just has to raise a hand and physics apologizes to him. The internet has already turned the moment into approximately forty thousand memes, and the movie is still months away, so expect that finger to be more famous than most working actors by autumn.
The rest of the trailer keeps its secrets close, offering quick flashes of destruction, worried faces, and at least three shots that will fuel theory videos with runtimes longer than the film itself. What it makes clear is the scale. This is Marvel swinging for the biggest crossover event since Endgame, and this time the roster includes mutants, a first family, and a team of reformed disasters all sharing one screen.
Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theaters December 18th. Bring a jacket, clear your schedule, and maybe apologize to your fingers in advance, because apparently they are capable of more than any of us knew.
