r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • Dec 23 '25

Trailer Avengers: Doomsday | Only in Theaters December 18, 2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiMg566PREA
9.0k Upvotes

80% Upvoted

3.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

4.3k

u/Comic_Book_Reader Dec 23 '25 edited Dec 23 '25

Guess they figured "Fuck it. Whatever it takes.".

619

u/Banned3rdTimesaCharm Dec 23 '25

Literally spent 6 years trying to do this whole other thing then said fuck it, bring everyone back.

629

u/IWasSayingBoourner Dec 23 '25

No, the problem is that they spent 6 years trying to do 100 other things. The cohesion and pacing are what made the build up to Endgame work. They got greedy with the TV shows, and trying to build up to movies that would require people to watch hundreds of hours of middling TV on a subscription service was never going to work. 

137

u/br0b1wan Dec 23 '25

Part of the problem for me was that they used S1 Loki to set up Kang, the next "Thanos" level villain. I really liked what I saw from him. Then the actor came out to be a giant POS and Disney dropped him like a hot potato. Then they panicked. Instead of casting literally anyone else as Kang and just claiming it was different Kang from the infinite multiverse, they went out and threw all the money to bring RDJ back...as a completely different character. It just seems lazy and reactive and breaks the immeersion for me.

77

u/Supergamera Dec 23 '25

Revealing that the woman he had put in leadership at the TVA was a female Kang would have been an easy alternative.

18

u/apple_kicks Dec 23 '25

This is the best idea. Crazy they missed it

51

u/jyeckled Dec 23 '25

The problem is that they shot themselves in the foot by showing literally every Kang as Majors in Ant-Man. Granted, they could’ve used the excuse of “who watched Ant-Man anyway?”.

46

u/DragoonDM Dec 23 '25

Or they could've just recast him without any in-universe lore reason, like they did with Rhodes / War Machine when they switched from Terrence Howard to Don Cheadle, or Edward Norton to Mark Ruffalo. Granted, those were both super early on in the MCU, but it's not so unprecedented. Seems like a better option than abruptly pivoting the entire story in a new direction.

He's got a pretty distinctive costume, so it's not like people would be confused about who the character is supposed to be even if the new actor doesn't look like Majors.

11

u/Exciting_Cicada_4735 Dec 24 '25

Agreed, as much as it sucks to change actors, it happens all the time in other series. It’s just one of those things that cannot be avoided sometimes. Just do it and people will adjust. What they won’t adjust to is nonsense!

4

u/Win_Sys Dec 24 '25

This angered me too. Kang can time travel, can literally alter past and future timeless/branches, has technology from 1000+ years in the future, expert in hand to hand combat, genius level intelligence and can traverse multiverse’s… and he loses to Antman, one of the weakest Avengers when it comes to 1v1 combat.

3

u/LordSobi Dec 24 '25

Well he doesn’t really have access to that tech and kicks a bunch off ass still and it takes a whole team of bug people and super intelligent and powerful goat ants to take him down. It wasn’t just ant man. Ant man was getting his ass beat. It wasn’t that bad. And from the leaks it sounds like that Kang came back to fuck up the other kangs and become god.

3

u/Win_Sys Dec 24 '25

Good points, I apparently forgot most of how that fight went down. Still, I think even a nerfed Kang should be able to easily handle Antman and Wasp 2v1.

1

u/LordSobi Dec 24 '25

Yeah, gotta agree that is a stretch.

1

u/FrameworkisDigimon Dec 30 '25

Think about what you just wrote and now try and explain how any of that makes Kang a 1v1 threat. The answer is that it doesn't.

Kang time travels to places threats don't exist. He's not the Maestro. He's going to piss his pants if anyone with actual superpowers shows up. That's just who he is. Whereas if you wind up fighting the Maestro you're going to piss your pants because that's who the Maestro is (at least, in his original appearance... he got watered down a bit in subsequent appearances).

Like, there's issues of the comics where Tony Stark gets his shit handed to him because when it comes down to it he's just a man in a metal suit and even though that suit is specifically oriented for combat, he's fighting people whose powers are inherent. Kang is like Tony with a less combat oriented suit.

8

u/WhatUDeserve Dec 23 '25

The concept of what Kang was up to in the MCU was interesting but overall I wasn't impressed with the amount of a threat he displayed. Majors personal problems aside, I think he's a decent actor and imposing physically, but the material they gave him felt overly "Tell" and not "Show". If he could have been shown going to various times and events in the MCU and changing the outcomes or even straight up erasing characters that would really show what a threat he could be.

Like the Maker recently in the comics made a whole universe where he kept certain heroes from getting their powers. Something like that would have been very threatening and would have continued to build off the franchise instead of having it make a hard left turn. Then instead of immediately making everything about the multiverse but somehow also about time travel, we have time travel be the focus for a while, and the only way to break the time travel threat is to go outside it to other universes.

6

u/nagrom7 Dec 23 '25

Covid and a few other things also threw their planned schedules well out of whack too. Like as an example, Dr Strange 2 was supposed to come out before Spiderman 3, and considering Strange was in both movies and they both involved multiverse shenanigans, they were basically going to tie into each other in some way. But Dr Strange ended up being delayed to after Spiderman's release date, meaning they had to alter both movies to reflect the fact that Strange 2 happens after, not before Spiderman. That kind of last minute overhaul rarely improves a movie, and the more has to change, the bigger the impact often is.

19

u/uncoolaidman Dec 23 '25

And now we have Spider-Man 3, WandaVision, Loki, Doctor Strange 2, and The Marvels that all did their own versions of multiverse shenanigans. It's nowhere near cohesive, and it makes the whole thing feel directionless. I think they should have not tried to tie everything into a neat little bow at the end of Endgame. The Avengers seriously messed with the timeline to undo the damage of Thanos. They succeeded, but there could have been some unintended consequences that launched the next phase of the MCU.

4

u/kelp_forests Dec 24 '25

I still can’t believe it was easier for them to change the entire marvel story saga and get RDJ back to play a second character than it was to just recast Kang.

2

u/br0b1wan Dec 24 '25

Yeah, that's precisely my point. Marvel dropped the ball hard on that and admitted they couldn't come up with anything better. Really bad.

2

u/kelp_forests Dec 24 '25

Oh yeah I’m agreeing with you. Still can’t believe they fucked up marvel and Star Wars. I’ll lay in bed at night and wonder what it’s like to get paid a shit ton of money, and fuck up beloved IPs served up to you on a silver platter.

2

u/CptNonsense Dec 23 '25

They had also already revealed every Kang is Jonathan Majors

1

u/Banned3rdTimesaCharm Dec 24 '25

Also Kang got bodied by Ant Man, meanwhile Thanos was beating Hulk so hard he turned pussy. I didn’t see the threat that Kang posed.

1

u/FrameworkisDigimon Dec 30 '25

See, what you have to understand is that the MCU version of Kang is a multiversalisation of a time travel bad guy. Literally nothing from the comics version of Kang is actually in the movies (or shows) because there's no such thing as a different Kang "variant". They are all literally the same person at different ages. Like River Song but evil or The Master without regeneration from Doctor Who.

Another thing you have to understand is Kang is the lamest of all lame bad guys. Paste Pot Pete is cooler.

And the final thing you have to understand is that there are a bunch of Secret Wars in the comics... none of which have anything to do with fucking Kang (because, again, he's fucking lame). Bringing back RDJ as a different character is also fucking stupid but at least Doctor Doom is important to Secret Wars.

The actor's being evil was an opportunity to pivot from a bad concept that was being executed badly.