After a year of teasers built around empty chairs, Marvel used its D23 showcase on 15 August to release a full trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, and with it the first proper look at Robert Downey Jr. as Victor von Doom. The film opens on 18 December. Here is what the trailer shows, and what it is careful not to.
What appears in the Doomsday trailer?
Doom, at last, in armour and green cloak, and Downey playing him with a stillness a long way from Tony Stark. Around him, the trailer moves through three casts. Chris Evans' Steve Rogers and Chris Hemsworth's Thor lead the returning Avengers, alongside Hayley Atwell and Sebastian Stan. Pedro Pascal's Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four appear in their retro-futurist New York. And then the X-Men: James Marsden, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Kelsey Grammer, Alan Cumming and Channing Tatum, reprising Cyclops, Magneto, Professor X, Beast, Nightcrawler and Gambit from the Fox films, and in Tatum's case finally getting to play the part he was cast in a decade ago. It is the first time all three groups have been shown together, which tells you where the film is going.
What is the story?
Three universes on a collision course. The Avengers, the Wakandans and the New Avengers from the main timeline; the Fantastic Four from their own Earth; the X-Men from theirs. Doom is the existential threat that draws them together, and the trailer frames him less as a destroyer than as a man with a plan for the multiverse and the will to impose it. The Russo brothers direct, returning after Endgame, and Avengers: Secret Wars follows on 17 December 2027.
Why the X-Men are the story
Marvel has spent seven years being asked when the X-Men would arrive, and its answer is to bring back the ones people already know. Stewart and McKellen back in their roles, in the same film as the Avengers, is the image people have been sharing since the trailer dropped, and the reaction suggests it landed. It is also a quietly bold choice: rather than recasting, Marvel is treating the Fox films as a universe worth honouring, which reframes twenty-five years of X-Men cinema as prologue rather than false start.
What the trailer does not show
What Doom actually does, beyond speaking. The trailer keeps his plan, his power and the rumoured returns that have circulated for a year out of frame, and it does not settle who else from the wider roster turns up, Spider-Man included. Marvel has learned from Infinity War that the best trailer for a crossover is the one that promises the collision without showing the crash. Tickets went on sale the same day.
Save the date
Avengers: Doomsday opens on 18 December 2026. The character teasers drew a billion views in three days back in January; the full trailer will not have done worse.
Halidom's Marvel editions include the Doomsday X-Men and Doctor Doom.