Five hours and 26 actors? Marvel’s exhausting Avengers ‘reveal’ spells Doomsday for the MCU

Superhero fatigue might be one of the most onerous problems facing Marvel today, but curiously, the studio seems to have decided to embrace it. How else to explain yesterday’s bizarre and even trollish publicity stunt to mark the start of production on Avengers: Doomsday, in which over five and a half exhaustingly minimalist hours, the names of 26 cast members were announced via a camera slowly rolling past a line of folding chairs?

As a work of grindingly slow cinema it took the biscuit, at a rate of no more than one crumb per minute. Sit it beside the work of Béla Tarr, the notoriously punishing Hungarian auteur, and the latter would look like…well, an early Marvel movie.

What was the point of this strange, protracted exercise? Partly it was to trumpet the return of a half-dozen familiar faces from the original Fox X-Men run: Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Kelsey Grammer, Alan Cumming, Rebecca Romijn and James Marsden. (No Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry or Anna Paquin, though – or at least, not yet.) Stewart has previously cameoed in the 2022 Doctor Strange sequel and Grammer in the post-credits scene of 2023’s The Marvels, but the others largely haven’t been seen in Marvel properties since the 2010s: Cumming has been MIA since 2003’s X2.

After last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine cashed in on nostalgia for Marvel’s pre-Cinematic Universe films to the tune of $1.3 billion, though, such a move has felt inevitable. So let’s discount that film’s cloying end-of-an-era postscript which strongly suggested that particular timeline and its inhabitants had now been put to bed for good. In the MCU no one ever dies or retires, providing the board is prepared to sign off on however many dump trucks of currency are required to lure them back.

Some, it seems, have resisted (or perhaps just weren’t asked). Among the names announced, the following veteran Avengers and hangers-on were notably absent: Elizabeth Olsen, Mark Ruffalo, the Chrises Evans and Pratt, Tom Holland, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ryan Reynolds, Don Cheadle, Jeremy Renner, Hayley Atwell, Oscar Isaac, Evangeline Lilly, Iman Vellani, Benedict Wong, Samuel L Jackson, Tatiana Maslany, Teyonah Parris and Brie Larson.

Patrick Stewart as Professor X in X-Men United – 20th Century Fox

Olsen, who has served a 10-year stretch as Scarlet Witch, suggested in a recent interview that her character wouldn’t return, while Evans has said a number of times that his version of Captain America is “happily retired”. Few fans will be yowling with dismay over the benching of second-stringers like Renner and Lilly, but the idea of a new Avengers film without, say, Holland’s Spider-Man, Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange or Larson’s Captain Marvel would be odd indeed.

Two possibilities: either they’re surprise inclusions, or are being held back for 2027’s Secret Wars, when they can breeze in and thwart whatever cliffhanger next summer yields. Another Marvel movie maxim: the promotional campaign is the film, which means plot twists are already in train.

A scene from Avengers: Infinity War

But this leaves both Marvel and its audience in a supremely odd position: not only was the stunt tedious, it was borderline meaningless, since no one believes these 26 names are the full extent of Doomsday’s cast, nor that all of them will play meaningful roles. (Unless the film itself is also five and a half hours long, that would be logistically impossible.) Robert Downey Jr’s prominence makes sense, since the former Iron Man star’s return as Doctor Doom appears to be Marvel’s overture to former fans whose interest in the franchise waned since his departure in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.

But how many of those other names will mean anything to those of us who have failed to keep pace with the series’ post-covid content splurge? Much of yesterday’s roll call was less a who’s who of recent superhero cinema than a who’s he: with apologies to Danny Ramirez, Tenoch Huerta Mejía, Hannah John-Kamen and Lewis Pullman, neither these actors nor their characters are marquee draws, which makes their inclusion in yesterday’s announcement feel like bloat for bloat’s sake.

It rather undercuts the clean promotional strategy behind this summer’s Fantastic Four: First Steps, which is positioning that film as not a fresh start for the franchise, but a non-threatening on-ramp for more casual consumers unschooled in the lore of the currently 13 MCU series currently available on Disney+.

So are we meant to understand this as a flex? Are Marvel showing us that, despite their recent commercial wobbles, they can still get a portion of the internet to spend the better part of a working day watching a camera trundle down a row of furniture, and glean nothing from it but a partial cast list?

Maybe so, but it was hard not to detect a certain brittleness in the gesture – a clenched insistence that the revelation of each of these names was a treat, honest it was, to get our tastebuds tingling in advance of the feast. But the prospect of a superhero binge isn’t what it was 10 years ago. Do many of us still have the stomach for a menu this poundingly expansive?