Avengers: Doomsday trailer – as the hype builds, has Marvel got lost in the multiverse?

Marvel has put the first official trailer for the new Avengers meetup before random screenings of Avatar: Fire and Ash. Recordings of it have leaked online – but many questions still remain

Is anything real any more? For the last few weeks there have been rumours that Marvel is about to drop the first official footage for its forthcoming superhero epic Avengers: Doomsday, ahead of screenings of Avatar: Fire and Ash. And it makes a sort of sense: the latest instalment of James Cameron’s 3D mega-project about blue aliens and colonial shame is clearly a visual spectacle, so why not lure fans of Captain America and Thor into cinemas by dangling the promise of a Doomsday trailer in front of them? In a world in which everyone expects everything to be online instantly, could the most radical experiment be to put this thing in cinemas?

If it once seemed like a good idea, it increasingly looks less so. There are rumoured to be multiple Doomsday trailers in circulation, to be ushered in ahead of select screenings of Fire and Ash. But several appear to have leaked online already, which means most Avengers superfans are now getting their first glimpse of the new movie through a prism of phone footage and compression artefacts. Audiences at early showings of Cameron’s film, meanwhile, have reported not seeing any Avengers trailer, though some insist they definitely saw something, briefly.

The first leaked trailer appears, according to multiple eyewitness accounts and fragments of poor-quality footage, to show Steve Rogers once again positioned as a central heroic presence, framed with unmistakably sentimental weight. On-screen text reportedly confirms that the character will return in Doomsday. Whether this is meant to be a tease, a misdirect or a deliberate provocation is unclear, but the implication alone has been enough to send fandom into overdrive.

This immediately creates a small mountain of problems. Marvel has already introduced a new Captain America in the form of Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, and has spent several years – including an entire Disney+ series and this year’s Captain America: Brave New World – establishing him as the future of the role. Chris Evans’ Rogers, meanwhile, was given a very public, very deliberate farewell in Endgame, as an old man who had slipped back through time to live out his remaining years with Hayley Atwell’s Peggy Carter. Are we really meant to believe that he is now returning, inexplicably youthful and combat-ready, to beat up Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom? And how much narrative sleight of hand is Marvel prepared to deploy before the idea of consequence finally collapses under its own weight?

There are, of course, ways the studio can explain all this weirdness without openly setting fire to Endgame. Perhaps Doomsday will introduce us to a variant Steve Rogers, one who was jettisoned from the main timeline before he even considered giving it all up for the love of a good woman. Maybe this is a Steve who has been dragged back into service by multiversal collapse. Or possibly this is simply what happens when a franchise wobbles at the box office and decides it needs Evans back. Another leaked trailer appears to focus on Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, suggesting that Doomsday really will see the old Avengers gang getting back together, even if Downey Jr is now in a very different suit.

For Marvel fans, it is hard to understand what’s going on. You can go and see Avatar and you might just catch an Avengers: Doomsday mini-trailer. But also, you might not. The best you can get online at the moment is a shaky phone clip that looks as if it was filmed from inside a pocket (or a completely legit but utterly pointless countdown video, telling you it’s going to be nearly a year before the film actually turns up in cinemas).

Is this what building hype and anticipation looks like in 2025? If so, Marvel has finally perfected a marketing strategy that feels appropriate to the age: a blockbuster launched as rumour, sustained by nostalgia, delivered via confusion, and headlined by two men who have already had their endings, now summoned back anyway.