Avengers: Doomsday doesn't have to be a great movie — fans admit no Avengers film ever was
Ten weeks before the MCU's biggest release in seven years, the fandom is settling expectations in an unexpectedly honest way.
With Avengers: Doomsday hitting theaters December 18, r/marvelstudios spent this week on a blunt question: does anyone honestly expect a great movie, or just a nostalgia-powered character pileup? The top answers took a third option, and it's the most self-aware the fandom has sounded in years:
"I hope it'll be fun. None of the mainline Avengers films have been 'great movies' by typical cinephile standards. They've been a toybox to smash the Hulk, Iron Man, Cap, and friends together… And that's what they should be."
— a commenter on r/marvelstudios (6 upvotes)
The numbers back the toybox theory better than fans might expect. Four Avengers films earned about $7.8 billion worldwide; their entire Academy Awards haul is three nominations for visual effects, zero wins, and no film in the series has ever been in the Best Picture conversation. Endgame is the second-highest-grossing movie ever made, and its sole Oscar nomination lost to 1917.
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Which makes this fan consensus a quiet, friendly echo of the most famous insult in modern film discourse. When Martin Scorsese compared Marvel movies to theme parks in 2019, the MCU faithful treated it as a declaration of war. Seven years later, the fandom's own expectation-setting for Doomsday is nearly word-for-word the same description, offered as a defense.
What "fun" has to carry this time
The trust, where it exists, is in the directors rather than the movie. The Russo brothers return after Infinity War and Endgame, with Robert Downey Jr. switched from Iron Man to Doctor Doom:
"Taking their MCU track record as context i have no reason to doubt the Russos"
— a commenter on r/marvelstudios (28 upvotes)
That track record is specifically a toybox track record. Infinity War and Endgame worked not because they were formally great cinema but because the collisions were staged by people who understood the weight of every action figure in the box — and Doomsday's box is heavier than ever, with the X-Men folded in and the original cast reshuffled.
Doomsday is the first half of a story that ends in Secret Wars a year later. The last time the Russos made the "heroes lose" half, it earned $2 billion.
Going in on December 18 expecting The Godfather is a setup for disappointment the franchise has never once earned. Going in expecting the best toybox crash the genre's most reliable crash-stagers can build — that's a bet with four precedents behind it.
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