No, it’s not a post about contemporary politics!

Now that this blog is available again to students—six months too late, yes, but still—I’ve been asked my opinion about the casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Dr. Doom. Implied in this, I think, is the whole constellation of recent developments in the MCU. That opinion has not changed since I wrote about it almost two and a half years ago, unfortunately. At this point, the failures have been so numerous and just so bad that my adult children who grew up on it no longer care at all. There have been very few bright moments since then: I would count Agatha All Along and Daredevil: Born Again (still ongoing at the time of this post) as successful, entertaining shows. Deadpool and Wolverine was very satisfying. We can even put Spider-Man: No Way Home in that category if we’re being generous (though as I said in that late-2022 post, plotwise it’s a bit of a mess). In theory, those four titles would show that even if we can’t quite say the MCU has still got it, we could feel somewhat confident they can get it back. In practice, I fear that the seed of its final demise is planted within each of them.

Each of the shows/films I mentioned depends on nostalgia for earlier shows/films. Agatha is built on the audience’s fond recollection for Wandavision, which remains the most critically acclaimed of the MCU shows. Daredevil: Born Again counts on the viewer’s appetite for picking back up with a show they loved when Netflix was in charge of it, and says, “What if we did that again? Would you watch that?” (Which, for me, yes.) No Way Home and Deadpool and Wolverine are entirely dependent on the viewer’s knowledge and love of non-MCU Marvel films (made by Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox in the years before Disney’s Marvel hegemony), and the assumption that audiences were dying to see Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, and a long list of heroes and villains from, let’s face it, a lot of mediocre or now very old movies drawn into the current universe. It feels like that is a recipe for diminishing returns. If you’re only making content that capitalizes on nostalgia, rather than telling stories for which future, younger viewers will eventually be nostalgic, you are by definition in late-stage MCU, to say nothing of capitalism.

And that brings us to Avengers: Doomsday, a title suggesting light work for headline writers if the movie turns out badly. First Disney brought back the Russo Brothers, directors of half (!) of the top-tier MCU films in the franchise’s first decade, most notably Infinity War and Endgame. Then the Russo Brothers revealed that Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars would be made as back-to-back films, like Infinity War / Endgame. And then the Russo Brothers revealed that they would be bringing back Robert Downey Jr., the actor widely accepted as the linchpin of phases 1-3, whose death in Endgame, in retrospect, seems to have marked the beginning of the end. But RDJ is back not as Tony Stark/Iron Man, but as Doctor Doom! The pitch Disney and the Russos seem to be making to multiverse-weary viewers is, “Of course it doesn’t make sense! But don’t you at least want to see what the heck we’re doing? Don’t you want to see Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen and RDJ and Chris Evans one last last last time?”

Being a comic book reader from way back, and a ground-level fanboy of the MCU, I in fact do want to find out what the heck they’re doing. Like many longtime Marvel readers, I suspect I already know, to an extent: Secret Wars is very likely the opportunity to get all the old bands back together one more time for a great big Multiversapalooza, hear all your old faves even if you suspect they are lip-synching at this point, and then—to mix my metaphors—unplug the MCU and wait two minutes before plugging it back in. Then they will rebuild the MCU starting out with the rights to almost all the intellectual property. (Hey, maybe in the meantime they’ll just buy Sony for the sake of putting Peter Parker on the mantle with the rest.) And though my adult kids might think I’m a sucker, I have hope that it will be entertaining and even satisfying. Doomsday will release next year, and I will hold out a fistful of cash and demand that they take it.

Oh, and Fantastic Four: First Steps is another reason for hope. That has to wait for another post.