Rumors surrounding the film and its marketing only further muddy things. Even by MCU standards, leaks have been frequent and uncorroborated. For every hard bit of information we get, such as Kelsey Grammer talking about a scene with Beast and Reed Richards that he shot with Pedro Pascal, there’s some AI-generated nonsense or a would-be influencer throwing out speculation as news (see: the many people certain that the Doomsday trailer would drop last week).
However, the following rumors about the trailer seem to have coalesced to the point that they seem likely, though still unconfirmed. Marvel will be releasing four trailers for Doomsday, starting this Thursday. The first three are teasers focusing on a specific character, each one ending with a countdown, before the release of a final, proper trailer for the entire movie. The first two teasers will be about Captain America and Thor, while the third will be about Doom himself.
The countdown motif matches the comic book lead-up to the 2015 Secret Wars event. Each of Marvel’s comics published before July 2015 had a banner reading “Time Runs Out” at the top, building tension as the Avengers and other heroes tried and failed to save their Earth from increasing incursions.
But the decision to lead with Captain America and Thor veers from the comics. While both certainly play big roles in every Secret Wars storyline in the comics, they are less important to Doom than the Beyonder, the godlike being who drives the first two Secret Wars stories from the 1980s, and certainly less so than Reed Richards, Doom’s classical arch-nemesis and the hero of the 2015 Secret Wars.
Rumors suggest that Doom will have a personal grudge against Steve Rogers, perhaps something involving Cap traveling across time to replace the Infinity Stones at the end of Endgame. But that still leaves the question of Thor, and why he would earn Doom’s ire? And what about Tony, does he get a trailer? And isn’t Doom’s whole thing that he hates Reed Richards, a guy who hasn’t even been on screen with him in the MCU yet?
In short, we probably won’t know what the teasers will be or what Doomsday will be until Marvel officially releases them. Until then, any attempts to see the future are doomed.
