Marvel gave fans their clearest look yet at “Avengers: Doomsday” this weekend, timed to D23, and the new material leans hard into two reunions the trailers had only hinted at before: a genuine X-Men legacy cast reunion, and Chris Hemsworth’s Thor sharing frame space with mutants who haven’t shared a movie with him in decades. New promotional art surfacing alongside the weekend’s festivities pulls Fox’s original X-Men actors together with Thor in a single image, a combination ComingSoon.net frames as the clearest visual confirmation yet of how directly these separate franchises are colliding on screen.
The art arrived alongside an official “Special Look” trailer that premiered during the D23 panel Friday, presented on stage by Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans and Hayley Atwell. The two-minute cut spends more time on Doctor Doom’s backstory than previous footage had, with Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm describing him at one point as damaged and adrift, while Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards confronts him directly in a devastated setting later in the trailer, according to AOL’s rundown of the footage. The same cut shows Doom throwing Thor around “like a ragdoll” and commanding an army of Sentinels, the classic mutant-hunting robots that raise the stakes considerably for a team that’s spent decades fighting them in the comics.
That Sentinel reveal builds on a much larger ensemble picture Marvel first confirmed back in July, when former Director of Visual Development Andy Park shared the film’s complete concept art publicly, art Kevin Feige had debuted days earlier at Bilibiliworld in Shanghai, according to Yahoo’s coverage of the reveal. Park, who was laid off from Marvel’s visual development team earlier this year, called it “the final full film I had the honor of leading” during his time at the studio.
That artwork organized the film’s sprawling cast into distinct clusters spanning three separate Marvel universes: the mainline MCU, the Fantastic Four’s Earth-828, and the X-Men’s Earth-10005, home to Fox’s original franchise, a structure WDWNT laid out in detail. The X-Men contingent includes Cyclops, Gambit, Mystique, Beast, Magneto and Professor X, according to a character breakdown from The Movie Blog, while a separate cluster gathers Steve Rogers and Thor alongside New Avengers members Yelena Belova, Red Guardian, Ghost, U.S. Agent, Sentry and Bucky Barnes. A third grouping places the Fantastic Four’s Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch and The Thing alongside Sam Wilson’s Avengers lineup of Falcon, Shang-Chi, Shuri’s Black Panther and M’Baku.
Eagle-eyed fans spotted one more detail buried in the original art: Loki, tucked beneath the frame and seemingly still tied to the Multiverse’s stability, despite not appearing in any of the previously leaked promotional material, GeekTyrant notes. It’s a small addition, but one that suggests his role in the film runs deeper than his brief teaser appearances so far.
Marvel has described the film as bringing together heroes from three distinct universes on a collision course with an existential threat, framing echoed in the studio’s own teaser campaign, according to MarvelBlog.com. Anthony and Joe Russo direct, returning to the franchise for the first time since “Avengers: Endgame,” which brought the full Marvel roster together on screen for what was, until this film, the last time, a seven-year gap SlashFilm points out is longer than any previous wait between full Avengers ensembles.
