Avengers: Doomsday Cast Announcement is Light on Stars, Heavy on Chairs
Marvel is ramping up the hype for its next big Avengers movie… or at least, it seems to think it is. Today, after weeks of rumblings and concept art and guesses about scheduling, Marvel released a video – a very, very long video – announcing the cast of Avengers: Doomsday. This should be exciting, but it’s not for a few reasons. First, it’s FIVE HOURS LONG! It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not; I’m actually lowballing it because the specific runtime is 5 hours, 27 minutes, 52 seconds. And they’re just revealing which actors (and, by extension, which characters) will be in the film, with a message that it’s currently in production, which we more or less knew. How do they fill these almost five and a half hours? By revealing the actors one by one via a series of chairs with their names on them. And they manage to stretch that out so long by lingering on each seat for 10-15 minutes. It’s boring, bloated, and entirely indicative of what Marvel has become. You can watch the video below if you want, and if you do, I advise skipping along after each reveal:
Remember when the Marvel people were showmen? They would do cool things like have Tom Hiddleston come on stage as Loki at Comic-Con and introduce a new trailer, or have Robert Downey Jr. walk out to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” throw roses to the crowd, and introduce the stars of Age of Ultron by handing each a rose, after which Josh Brolin stomped on stage wearing the Infinity Gauntlet and ate his rose, letting us know that Thanos was coming for the Avengers. Those were fantastic moments; they got people all over the world jazzed for the movies, and they took about five minutes. Now? Chairs. Chairs for over five hours. How is Marvel not embarrassed by this? I get that there’s no footage, and all the actors probably aren’t on set yet, and this isn’t a big Comic-Con type of event, but good God, why not show some footage of the characters from previous films? Why not show clips of Doctor Doom from old cartoons or pages from the comics? Why not do something even slightly fun or interesting? It’s like I keep saying about Marvel: they just don’t care anymore. You can tell from the list of actors appearing in the Avengers: Doomsday cast, and if you didn’t subject yourself to that video (for which I don’t blame you at all), you can see the list via the chairs (heaven forfend we forget the chairs) in this Instagram post from Marvel’s account:
View this post on Instagram
Yeah, there they are, and it’s a mostly underwhelming lineup that reminds you of everything Marvel once was and what it’s become now. There are the MCU biggies like Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, and… I don’t know, Paul Rudd, I guess… mixed with the Thunderbolts* cast, the replacement heroes like Anthony Mackie and Letitia Wright, the entire Fantastic Four, and nobodies like Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi and Tenoch Huerta Mejía’s Namor (not that Namor should be a nobody, but considering what they apparently did to him in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, I don’t think anyone cares anymore). The biggest news is the reveal that a bunch of the Fox X-Men actors will be reprising their roles: Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn, Kelsey Grammer, and Alan Cumming, with Channing Tatum returning as Gambit, whom he played in Deadpool & Wolverine. I’m looking forward to these actors more than anything, at least in terms of potential (and I’ll admit to smiling wide when they played that snippet of the X-Men theme from the animated series), but it’s most likely that these guys will have about five minutes of screen time while Black Panther’s sister, Black Widow’s sister, and Captain America’s two sidekicks have major roles. Then, there’s Robert Downey Jr., who should be exciting to have back, but he’s not playing Tony Stark because these creatively bankrupt “artists” cast him as Doctor Doom. Even Hemsworth and Hiddleston aren’t all that reassuring to see because the Disney+ show ruined Loki, and Thor will probably be turned into a buffoon again like he is in everything now. There’s not a lot to get excited about.
What’s maybe more interesting than who Marvel named is who they didn’t. There are some major players missing in the Avengers: Doomsday cast announcement. Of the original Avengers, the Hulk and Hawkeye are still around (Captain America may be, too, but he’s an old man now), but Mark Ruffalo and Jeremy Renner weren’t announced. Given what they did to his villains a month ago, maybe all the Hulk scenes were rewritten and given to Sam Wilson. Tom Holland and Benedict Cumberbatch aren’t listed either, suggesting that Spider-Man and Doctor Strange won’t be around for Doomsday. I think part of this is because Tom Holland is filming The Odyssey for Christopher Nolan right now, and after that, he’ll be gearing up for Spider-Man 4, which is supposed to shoot in the summer. Cumberbatch has a couple of films in production right now as well. Imagine losing Spider-Man and Doctor Strange but gaining Shang-Chi and Ghost. No characters who originated on a Disney+ series are in the cast, either, so Marvel may have finally learned that it’s best to separate the movies from the streaming shows that nobody has seen. And maybe most surprisingly, Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds aren’t in the cast despite Deadpool & Wolverine being such a massive hit and the other X-Men heavy hitters being in the movie. Similarly, Halle Berry, Anna Paquin, and Famke Janssen, who played Storm, Rogue, and Jean Grey for Fox, aren’t on the list, either. I think this means that either this is not really the whole cast, and Marvel wants to keep a few secrets, or a lot of the characters are being saved for Avengers: Secret Wars, with Doomsday being the (somewhat) lower-key setup for the main event. If so, I think the people who guessed that concept art from a few weeks ago was from Secret Wars and not Doomsday were correct, which explains why Chris Pratt and Paul Bettany are also absent from the cast announcement. (If that art was real and still being used, it means the Disney+ Mouseketeers will also show up in Secret Wars, which… ugh.) I suppose we’ll see what happens, but to me, this was a total misfire and an unnecessary one at that.
Let us know what you think of the Avengers: Doomsday cast announcement in the comments!
***
Get a META PC today; use code “199” to save on all purchases!
If you want to know what kind of political leanings movies have or just talk about cinema, check out the movie ratings community Criticless.
Get Your Geeks + Gamers merch here!
