A Rant on Marvel and Their Marketing Team

Welcome back to the blog readers. In case you did not know, Marvel has a little-known film coming out next year called Avengers: Doomsday (2026). The reveal of this film at July's Comic-Con convention quite literally broke the internet when a certain Oscar-winning somebody came out in a Doctor Doom mask and revealed himself as the Marvel Cinematic Universe's newest big bad. We also got the return of Anthony and Joe Russo directing this film after directing Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Civil War (2016), and Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Endgame (2019). So hype for this film has been building, especially hearing of the returns of Stephen McFeely as co-writer of Doomsday with Michael Waldron and Alan Silvestri returning to do the score. But what happened yesterday might just be the dumbest and most baffling thing I have ever seen Marvel do.

I want to start by talking about the debacle that happened in February, ahead of the reveal of the trailer for the upcoming film The Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025). The day before the trailer was set to arrive, Marvel let us know that the trailer would be coming tomorrow via a livestream that was to start at 7am Eastern time. They were also calling it a "Launch Event." Once that time came, the stream started with a one-hour countdown, in which random pictures started popping up. Once the countdown ended, an awkward Q&A started in which the cast was asked uncomfortable questions for like 15-20 minutes and then the trailer started. Why make us wait for a livestream, only for us to have to wait for a countdown in said stream, only to make us wait longer for a Q&A that meant literally nothing afterwards? The marketing team completely botched this, and I thought they would have learned their lesson after that. Clearly, they did not.

We had known that Avengers: Doomsday would be beginning production around this time, but we learned that yesterday was the true beginning of cameras rolling. As John Campea says, the tangibilization of this film is becoming more and more real. I had heard rumblings that yesterday morning we would be getting an announcement from Marvel that would be bigger than Robert Downey Jr.'s casting as Victor von Doom / Doctor Doom, but I figured it would be for something related to the upcoming production of the currently untitled sequel to Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), also set for release in 2026. But my brother is the one who was texting me that it was the official cast reveal for Doomsday. I expected a bunch of fan service and pizazz, but got none of that.

The reveal went a bit something like this: someone would put a director's chair down in front of a camera with an actor's name on it, and the process would repeat itself every 12-15 minutes. So this livestream went on for almost 5 and a half hours with 27 chairs being placed. How fucking dumb was this? There are so many better ways in which this reveal could have been done. Kevin Feige could have came on a soundstage and revealed the names in a video presentation. Or you could have done the chair situation if the panning was every 30-60 seconds instead of every 12-15 minutes. This was a total waste of everybody's time and I am so glad I was at work when this was happening. And I have not even gotten to the names that got announced. I loved what names I saw on the chairs, but how they were revealed was such a fucking joke. Marvel completely dropped the ball on this reveal.

I figured since we were talking about the reveal, we should actually now talk about the names on those chairs. This is not something I normally do, since I am not a reporter of news, but this is big, big news. Here are the names of the actors revealed in yesterday's "reveal:"

• Chris Hemsworth as Thor

• Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm / Invisible Woman

• Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson / Captain America

• Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes

• Leticia Wright as Shuri / Black Panther

• Paul Rudd as Scott Lang / Ant-Man

• Wyatt Russell as John Walker / U.S. Agent

• Tenoch Huerta Mejía as Namor

• Ebon-Moss Bachrach as Ben Grimm / The Thing

• Simu Liu as Xu Shang-Chi

• Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova

• Kelsey Grammer as Hank McCoy / Beast

• Lewis Pullman as Bob / Sentry

• Danny Ramirez as Joaquin Torres / Falcon

• Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm / Human Torch

• David Harbour as Alexei Shostakov / Red Guardian

• Winston Duke as M'Baku

• Hannah John-Kamen as Ava Starr / Ghost

• Tom Hiddleston as Loki

• Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier / Professor X

• Ian McKellen as Erik Lensherr / Magneto

• Alan Cumming as Kurt Wagner / Nightcrawler

• Rebecca Romijn as Raven Darkhölme / Mystique

• James Marsden as Scott Summers/ Cyclops

• Channing Tatum as Remy LeBeau / Gambit

• Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards / Mister Fantastic

• Robert Downey Jr. as Victor von Doom / Doctor Doom

Look at the names on this list. There is A-level talent on this list and you cannot deny it at all. Channing Tatum is boutta make a name for himself...again. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen reunite in a superhero film for the first time since X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). James Marsden is killing it (according to everyone who has seen it, I have not yet) in Hulu's Paradise (2025-). Pedro Pascal in in a renaissance right now, especially with The Last of Us (2023-) returning in April. Y'all know how much I love Florence Pugh. David Harbour is awesome and so is freaking Kelsey Grammer. And don't forget Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. There is a lot of talent on this list, and even more waiting for their names to be called since apparently Marvel is not done making casting announcements for Doomsday. If this keeps up, Sarah Halley Finn will have an Oscar on her mantle in no time (by way of the new Best Casting category that will be debuting at the upcoming 98th Oscars ceremony).

I know this is yet another rant on something stupid that happened in the world of Hollywood, and I only bring this to light because this is Marvel man. I basically grew up on these films. I remember seeing Iron Man (2008) in theaters as a 10-year old kid and being filled with so much wonder and awe. This has been my life for what is going on 17 years and I just wish they would make reveals like this exciting again. This is still my second most anticipated film of 2026 (behind The Odyssey (2026)), and this reveal did nothing to damper that excitement. I just hope that we can get Infinity War and Endgame-level quality with these films because they are the flagship after all. Thank you all for reading, and I will see you for the next post.