Skipped VisionQuest? You might walk into Avengers: Doomsday missing its biggest return
The finale of a Disney+ show just did what three trailers couldn't, and AMC's servers have the error screens to prove it.
Full spoilers for the VisionQuest finale below.
The timeline first. On November 10, VisionQuest dropped its eighth and final episode on Disney+. By the morning of November 11, the AMC app was serving error screens to people trying to buy Avengers: Doomsday tickets — the second time Doomsday demand has knocked it over, after the initial August on-sale that AMC's CEO said tripled the traffic of Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
AMC hasn't named a cause for the new surge. The cause had a premiere date.
Because what the finale did, in its final minutes, is resurrect Wanda Maximoff. The scene — lifted directly from Doomsday — finds her under the Mount Wundagore rubble she pulled down on herself in Multiverse of Madness, eyes opening as Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom stands over her: "Scarlet Witch, awaken. Your power will be mine." Four years of "is Wanda really dead" ends not in a trailer, not at a Comic-Con panel, but in the post-credits of a show a lot of people planned to skip.
The boycott that just bought tickets
The detail that makes this a box-office story and not just a plot leak: Wanda is the character whose death made a chunk of the fandom swear off the MCU entirely. The r/boxoffice thread called that cohort's next move immediately:
"I wonder how many tickets will be sold for [Redacted] fans who claimed they would never watch another MCU film that didn't include the character."
The answer is in the error screens. Doomsday presales were already past $125 million worldwide before the finale; the November 11 surge is the Wanda wave arriving on top of it.
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The rule that died this week
For three years Marvel has apologized for its own television. The Disney+ shows were blamed for superhero fatigue, and the official line became that nothing on streaming would be required viewing — the movies would stand alone. VisionQuest just demonstrated the opposite strategy working better than anything else Marvel tried this cycle.
Marvel spent years promising the shows are optional. The biggest Doomsday reveal premiered in episode 8 of one.
No Doomsday trailer crashed a ticketing app. The finale of a mid-tier Disney+ series about Vision did, because it carried an actual piece of the movie inside it. That's the playbook shift worth watching after December 18: the shows stopped being homework and became the marketing. And the inverse now applies — if you skipped VisionQuest on Marvel's own old advice, you'll meet Doomsday's biggest returning player with no idea how she got out from under the mountain.
Previously we wrote: James Gunn said Adria Arjona would be a great Wonder Woman. In three weeks it won't be his call