By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 minute ago
It’s been a crazy week or so for Marvel: originally, the studio intended to premiere its first Avengers: Doomsday trailer ahead of James Cameron’s epic film Avatar: Fire and Ash. Unfortunately, the trailer was leaked online days earlier, showing a few quiet scenes of Steve Rogers (complete with old uniform and new baby) getting ready to dive back into the superhero game.
It’s a weird and underwhelming trailer, and when I tried to figure out why, it hit me. Marvel is marketing Avengers: Doomsday to casual fans rather than those who have kept the studio afloat in recent years.
The Trailer Marvel Didn’t Want You To See Yet
If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, it mostly features Steve Rogers (the young one last seen hopping into the past at the end of Avengers: Endgame) holding his infant son, checking out his old Captain America uniform, and riding a motorcycle, leading to the promise that “Steve Rogers Will Return In Avengers: Doomsday.” One reaction I kept seeing online was that fans should have been able to tell this trailer was real because it was far more disappointing than the bevy of AI trailers featuring endless cameos and life-or-death stakes. The more I looked, the more I saw this was the general online reaction: confusion and disappointment.
I kept pondering why Marvel would drop the ball with the first look at its most highly anticipated movie since Avengers: Endgame. Eventually, I came to a shocking conclusion: that Kevin Feige and the rest of these high-power execs were marketing Doomsday to more casual audiences rather than to hardcore fans. To those casual audiences, the most important part of this trailer was the promise that Steve Rogers (the original Captain America and a worldwide fan-favorite) would be returning to the MCU.
Superhero Fatigue: The Real Big Bad
This is, of course, part of Marvel trying to fight off superhero fatigue by returning to the creative well of what worked before. Rather than deliver a new story featuring new characters, Marvel is giving us Civil War 2.0, with the former Captain America fighting a Doctor Doom with the face of Tony Stark. Like Endgame, Doomsday will prominently revolve around Rogers and Stark; like Endgame, the movie will also have a small army of cameos to populate each bit of grey CGI slurry that Marvel calls an action scene.
This trend will continue in the very near future, which is why upcoming Avengers: Doomsday trailers will feature characters like Thor (another OG Avenger) and Doctor Doom (a new baddie wearing Tony Stark’s face). While this marketing strategy may ultimately work out (only time will tell what Doomsday’s box office looks like), I can’t help but feel that Marvel is effectively marketing to the wrong fans. Rather than trying to appeal to casual audiences, the studio should be trying to appeal to comic book movie diehards instead.
Marvel Is Ignoring The Fans Who Kept Them Alive
After all, these are the diehards that kept Marvel Studios afloat even when superhero fatigue turned movies like The Marvels into high-profile bombs. These are the fans that have plenty of crunchy questions about Doomsday, including what the villain’s plans are, what his motive is, and where Steve Rogers fits into all this. Those fans would have liked a trailer with answers to these questions rather than one that simply put a familiar face back onscreen.
I don’t say this to gatekeep, and I never want to be lumped in with the online neckbeards screaming that some multimedia juggernaut (not the one powered by the Crimson Gem of Cytorrak) has somehow ruined their childhoods. But from a completely pragmatic standpoint, Marvel should better cater to its superfans if only because they become passionate brand ambassadors who drag their normie friends to the theater. Catering only to normie fans is a gamble because it assumes they will show up for a famous, recognizable hero, just as they did for Deadpool & Wolverine.
However, superhero fatigue was enough to turn several MCU films into major box office disappointments (including Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Captain America: Brave New World) and at least one (The Marvels) into an outright bomb. This happened because the average moviegoer stopped caring about all these tights-and-flights adventures, while diehard fans carried the not-so-human torch and kept the lights on for Marvel. Here’s hoping that Doomsday’s future trailers do a better job of appealing to fanboys and casual audiences alike, or this movie could become the kind of failure the studio will never recover from.
