It’s been more than a decade since the Marvel Cinematic Universe kicked off the Avengers franchise, and a lot has happened in theaters since then, including plenty of records being broken. Several phases have come and gone, and now the new one is getting another movie centered on the heroes after seven years. Avengers: Doomsday brings together characters who have meant a lot to many fans, only now they’re all in one place to face Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom in a bigger and more epic story. The trailer has already been released and caused quite a stir among fans, especially because of the reaction it sparked. And that inevitably leads to comparisons between the upcoming movie and the Avengers films that came before it.
The MCU has already delivered major crossovers and even had a huge production that brought almost its entire universe together for one battle. So, can it do that again, only with even more characters and on an equally massive scale without feeling like a copy? How do you sell Doomsday the right way? To get a better idea, we compared its trailer with those of the 4 previous Avengers movies. And to keep things fair, we selected only the first trailer for each one.
The Avengers is a really interesting case for comparison because 14 years have passed since then, and its trailer has aged in a pretty fascinating way. Is it dated? Yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact, watching it today, it almost feels like a relic. The editing, visual effects, soundtrack, and even the way the movie is presented all have a very specific early-2010s aesthetic, but that’s part of its charm. And the best part? It didn’t need any kind of gimmick to sell the movie, because the idea was simple: you already know Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, and now you’re going to meet Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye — all together in the same movie. And back then, that alone was a big deal.
Nowadays, with so much time having passed, the saturation of superhero films, and the challenge of reinventing the formula, it’s much harder for Doomsday to have that same advantage, because bringing the Avengers together is no longer anything new. It does have an advantage because its first trailer already includes them, and also the X-Men, the Thunderbolts, the Fantastic Four, the heroes of Wakanda, and Shang-Chi. But if we’re making a fair comparison, even with all those additional characters, it still doesn’t come close to the excitement The Avengers trailer generated. Is Doomsday still bigger in several ways? Absolutely. But the difficulty is it has to convince that, after Infinity War and Endgame, there’s still a crossover that can feel really special.
Of all the Avengers movie trailers, Age of Ultron is the easiest to identify since it knows exactly what it wants to sell to fans. It doesn’t focus on the fact that the heroes are back together; instead, it focuses on the big problem they’re about to create and how much it could affect the entire world. The scale gets bigger, and the trailer is pure tension from beginning to end, introducing the dangerous Ultron while also bringing Wanda and Pietro Maximoff into the mix. In every way, it has a personality of its own, and it feels like an evolution compared to The Avengers trailer, almost as if it’s taking the next step toward a much more serious and impactful story. There’s a genuinely darker vibe to it.
But how does it compare to Doomsday? Both trailers put a major threat front and center and focus on how it might be too much for the heroes to handle; the difference is in how they get there. The new movie’s footage prioritizes the people involved in the mission to defeat Doom over trying to explain exactly who he is. In short, Doomsday doesn’t really tell a story in its trailer or provide much context, almost as if it trusts that audiences already understand the level of danger because they know who the villain is. It feels much more designed to create buzz around Steve’s presence or the X-Men entering the MCU. It’s a trailer that lives on its individual moments, while Age of Ultron is more effective as a whole.
This is where Doomsday has a real problem, because the first Infinity War trailer is probably the hardest standard to reach. By that point, people had already spent years following Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Spider-Man, and Doctor Strange in their own solo movies, and now they were all appearing in the same production. So every appearance in the trailer carried years of context: when Thor meets the Guardians, when the Avengers show up in Wakanda, or when Thanos appears with the Infinity Gauntlet, we’re watching completely different stories finally collide. Doomsday is trying to create a similar reaction, but it’s taking a different approach.
The idea now is to bring together different versions of Marvel’s cinematic history, which makes the new film’s trailer seem bigger — at least in theory. The impact of the Infinity War trailer comes from all the context built up since the first Avengers movie, while in this new phase of the MCU, even though there have been solo movies like The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Thunderbolts*, for example, there just hasn’t been enough time to create the strong feeling that everything was leading somewhere. It’s too early to judge Doomsday, since the movie hasn’t even been released yet, but the trailer creates more curiosity about the idea of an iconic crossover than about the urgency of the situation these characters are going to face. Maybe what it’s missing are more powerful scenes like the ones Infinity War had in its trailer.
The fact that the first Endgame trailer opens with a brief recap of each original Avenger’s story alongside memories of the Blip is already enough to give anyone chills. It has weight, legacy, history, and emotion — all of which immediately create a sense of something epic. But what’s most interesting is that it doesn’t reveal much about the actual plot, much like the Doomsday trailer. The footage is largely built around the characters preparing for what’s coming and how each of them is about to give everything they have to defeat Thanos. And why does that work? Because everyone was already emotionally invested after Infinity War. There was no real need to sell the movie that hard.
In Endgame‘s case, that approach makes perfect sense. Everyone was naturally curious to see how the story would end, so showing too many incredible scenes in the trailer would only risk wasting the impact the movie could have in theaters. Doomsday, on the other hand, can’t quite afford that luxury. Even though it doesn’t show much that’s truly important, Doctor Doom hasn’t officially been introduced yet, so the movie needs to establish the scale of the event ahead of time because that is, to a large extent, the reason the film exists. It can’t hide too much, but it also can’t reveal too much. In short, Endgame built anticipation through what it kept hidden, while Doomsday builds anticipation through what it reveals. But the 2019 feature has one advantage: it already felt like the end of an era, which made the trailer hit harder on an almost subconscious level.
Avengers: Doomsday hits theaters on December 18.
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