To me! My… folding chairs?!
Marvel raised a lot of questions yesterday when they chose to announce the cast of its much-anticipated Avengers: Doomsday via a five and a half hour video posted to social media, in which the camera moves every 12 minutes or so to reveal a new chair with a star’s name on the back.
But the biggest questions might be around names such as Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming, and James Marsden. These names all belong to stars of the Fox X-Men movies from the 2000s, films made outside of Disney’s influence and before the MCU ever existed. It isn’t the first time that characters from the Fox X-Men movies have showed up in MCU movies before, of course. Last year nostalgia for their era powered Deadpool & Wolverine well north of $1 billion. But giving the name Doomsday and its role as a lead-up to Secret Wars, this return feels like the real final swan song for this version of the X-Men.
Revealing the Secret Wars
Marvel has published four major storylines called Secret Wars, all but one of which deal with the same basic idea. Secret Wars and Secret Wars II, written by one-time Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter, both involve an all-powerful being called the Beyonder who intercedes in the heroes’ lives. In Secret Wars II, the Beyonder learns about humanity by taking the form of Michael Jackson but as a white man (yes, really). He thus requires Spider-Man to teach him how to pee (also really), and kills and resurrects the teens in the New Mutants just because he can.
But the first Secret Wars is more straightforward story, in which the Beyond transports a bunch of heroes and villains to a Battleworld so they all can all fight one another. The 2015 Secret Wars and its multi-year round up by Jonathan Hickman reimagines that plot, with the various alternate realities all colliding and destroying one another. To save their own Earths, the heroes and villains of the various realities sometimes decide to destroy the other reality first, thereby avoiding the collision.
It’s this latter storyline that Marvel has been hinting most often. The Illuminati of Earth-838 in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness talks about their awareness of the dangers posed by other realities. At the end of that movie, Clea arrives to recruit Strange’s help in stopping “incursions,” using the word that Hickman uses to describe the collisions in his Secret Wars opus. Simiarly, n the post-credit scene of Captain America: Brave New World, the Leader (Tim Blake Nelson) warns Cap (Anthony Mackie) that heroes from other realities will do anything to protect their Earths, even threatening our own.
Thus it’s not hard to imagine that Avengers: Doomsday is about exactly that: the heroes and villains of various realities fighting to save their Earths. And it might end exactly like the stories leading up to Secret Wars ends, with Doctor Doom doing the unthinkable to save his reality, challenging and defeating the Beyonders, and using their power to recreate reality in which he is the God Emperor.
In other words, Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars might follow the same thematic path as the Russo Brothers‘ last pair of Avengers films. Avengers: Infinity War is about Thanos trying to save the galaxy by gathering the Infinity Stones and snapping half of all life out of existence, dealing the Avengers a loss. In Avengers: Endgame, the defeated heroes spend some time in their new normal before gathering strength to set things right. Doomsday could be about Doctor Doom and his own heroes destroying other realities to save his Earth, defeating the Avengers and creating his own reality, a reality that will be undone through Secret Wars.
If Doomsday and Secret Wars do follow that model, it’s very bad news for the Fox X-Men.
Superhero Death Must Sting
“Asgard is not a place,” the Chris Hemsworth’s God of Thunder remembers his father telling him at the end of Thor: Ragnarok. “Asgard is a place where our people stand.” Those words brought comfort to Thor as he watched the destruction of the place he grew up calling Asgard. This concept let Ragarok end happily, as most superhero movies must.
But when we see Thor and his people again at the start of Infinity War, they’re being decimated by Thanos. Thanos kills Loki and Heimdall, and only Hulk escapes, making his way back to Earth to warn Doctor Strange about the coming of the Mad Tyrant.
Like Ragnarok, Deadpool & Wolverine has a happy ending for its displaced people, the Fox X-Men. After battling across realities to keep the TVA from pruning their Earth, Wade and Logan share a dinner with all their friends, seemingly safe in their own reality.
But now they have to die. Not that we necessarily want bad things to happen to the Fox X-Men (well, not entirely that, anyway). It’s just that Marvel needs to actually give some stakes to these characters, especially if they’re bringing back guys like Patrick Stewart as Professor X. We’ve already seen Stewart’s Charles Xavier die three times on screen, once in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, once in 2017’s Logan, and most recently in 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Sure, Xavier and the X-Men have died time and again in the comics. But it’s becoming especially meaningless in the movies, especially since Marvel keeps wanting us to act surprised when the X-Men come back, and then again when they get killed. The trick isn’t working anymore, and if Marvel wants Doomsday to have any weight, it can’t even pretend to pull this trick again. This version of the X-Men need to meet their doom for good.
The death of the X-Men fits the model set by Infinity War. It’s easy to imagine Doomsday opening in the reality of the Fox X-Men, fighting for the survival of their reality. When they fail—either because of an incursion or because of Doctor Doom and his team—Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who has been stranded in this reality since the ending of The Marvels, escapes to warn the Avengers of Earth-616, just like the Hulk did before her.
The Fall of the Mutants
All this talk of final deaths might sound silly in relationship to Avengers: Doomsday, a movie that boasts about bringing back Robert Downey Jr. and the Russo Brothers, people from the height of Marvel’s success returning to the fold.
Yet it’s impossible to believe that all of these references to the past will keep working. If Marvel actually wants to become relevant again, it cannot keep pointing out that it isn’t as good as it was five or more years ago. It needs to close the book on the past and move forward, starting by letting Doomsday actually doom some beloved heroes.
Avengers: Doomsday arrives May 1, 2026.
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