Avengers: Doomsday opens on December 18, and I’ve spent the last few months rewatching the films and shows that feed into it. That’s more than twenty posts, and nobody should have to read all of them before opening weekend, so this is the shortcut, my Avengers Doomsday guide to the setups that matter and what each one’s going to mean in December. It runs over five pages. This page is the three people who’ve carried Captain America’s shield, because the trailers have made that impossible to ignore, then it’s Doom and the multiverse rules, the mutants, Loki and Shang-Chi, and finally Thor, Wakanda and the Guardians. Start with the July trailer if you haven’t seen it, it’s two and a half minutes and I’ll be coming back to it a lot.
Three Men Have Carried the Shield
Steve handed the shield to Sam at the end of Endgame, and almost everything since has been a long argument about whether that was the right call. But the real starting point is The Winter Soldier, where Steve burns S.H.I.E.L.D. down in the third act of a film most people remember for the lift fight. The film presents that as the only available option, which isn’t the same as it being right, and what grew in the hole is more or less everything. Bucky’s road starts there too, and it’s the longest thing anybody’s built in this franchise. The character who couldn’t speak in 2014 is on the roster for December, expected to hold his own in the largest cast Marvel’s ever put together.
Which brings me to Steve himself, because Marvel’s first teaser back in December 2025 was all about him. A motorbike pulls up at a farmhouse, a hand opens a drawer with the old suit folded up in it, and then Steve’s sitting holding a baby, smiling, and the title card says he’ll return. There’s no fight, no shield in anybody’s hand, nothing that looks like a mission. And he’s in the footage since, long-haired and bearded in a dark bomber jacket, grinning at about 1:57 of the July trailer and turning up again at 0:16 of the thirty-second spot, in the same scene as Sam and Scott Lang. So he’s clearly not just a cameo in a flashback, and how that squares with the old man on the bench at the end of Endgame is something I’m happy to wait for. What I notice is how little of that first teaser’s about action. It’s about what he walked away to, and that’s going to be what’s at risk.
Sam, Walker and the Cap Joke
Sam’s the Captain America who had to earn it, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier spends six episodes making him do that. I said I couldn’t see how a man without the serum does what that shield requires, I said it should’ve been Bucky, and I’m holding most of that because the physics hasn’t gone anywhere. Getting Isaiah Bradley’s name into the Smithsonian is still the best ending that show produces, though, and Brave New World moved me further than I expected. It keeps putting Sam in rooms rather than fights, which felt like the film hedging in 2025 and looks a lot more deliberate now. Sam was never going to be Steve with a different face. And if you’re going up against Doctor Doom, being good in a room might be the skill that counts.
Then there’s John Walker, the Captain America most people have forgotten they were meant to have an opinion about. The best moment in that whole series is still Walker in the public square, taking the serum and killing a surrendering man with the shield in front of a crowd of phones. Bloody shield, silence, credits. So when the thirty-second spot from October has somebody asking “Right Cap?” in a room full of Avengers, and Walker in his beret pipes up with “I was also Cap for a minute,” it’s the funniest thing Marvel’s put out so far and it’s got a nasty edge if you remember how his minute ended. He’s there because Thunderbolts made him part of the team, a lot that inherited the Avengers shorthand without doing any of the work, and it shows every time somebody says the name out loud. So that’s the original, the current one and the disgraced one in one building, and I can’t think of a better way of getting that argument on screen than having them bicker over a title.
Doom Is the Only Villain Who Fits
Doomsday exists because Kang didn’t work. Quantumania was meant to launch years of Kang stories, and that plan got dropped, so The Kang Dynasty became Doomsday with Doom in the middle of it. I’ve had my doubts about Kang since 2023, because a villain made of infinite variants dilutes himself, where Thanos got built up slowly over several films. I also said being right for the wrong reasons is mostly luck, my objection was about drama and the outcome was about circumstance. Was Doom an upgrade or a panic move? A panic move that happened to land on the right answer, and I’d rather they got lucky than stayed the course out of stubbornness. That makes Quantumania one of the most skippable films in the rewatch, not because it’s bad but because the franchise itself decided it didn’t matter, so watch the Council of Kangs scene and see what got left behind.
The trailers lean right into him. He’s mostly a green hood and a metal mask. The shot everybody’s going to remember comes about a minute and a half into the July trailer, when Thor comes down on him in a storm of lightning with Mjolnir, and one gloved hand just stops it. No effort. Thor’s eyes are white, the man in the hood hasn’t moved, and it’s over in seconds. Robert Downey Jr. under that mask had me unsure in 2024, I wondered if it was an admission they couldn’t move past him, and that reading hasn’t held up at all. Doom isn’t Tony Stark with a mask on, and nothing in the footage suggests it. There’s only one of him, and after Kang that’s the whole appeal.
The Rules Got Set in Multiverse of Madness
Incursions are the one thing you can’t skip. Two universes touch and both die, and Multiverse of Madness says so almost in passing, four years before the film that pays it off. It also establishes that the people who police this can be wiped out in an afternoon, and that crossing over depends on a person rather than a machine. Almost every rule December’s going to run on got set there, in a film I ranked below its predecessor, because it’s the more consequential one and the less enjoyable one. I’ve still got the same complaint about Wanda, too. Marvel keeps stopping its most powerful characters by having them choose to stop. I’d have let her take what she wanted, had Strange fail outright, and made the next film about him using the Darkhold to undo it.
WandaVision is the other half of that, and it’s where the rewatch surprised me most. The cabin scene at the end played as redemption in 2021, and the whole series is built to earn that. Knowing what follows, it’s much closer to a relapse waiting to happen, and the scene hasn’t changed at all, just everything around it. A show that careful about grief deserved a film equally careful and it got a horror movie instead. Nothing’s dented the Ship of Theseus scene, meanwhile, and Vision’s quiet exit is a remarkable way to leave somebody introduced as the culmination of two films’ worth of setup. Monica’s the thread that keeps going, since it runs from Westview to The Marvels and on to the X-Men, and I found her flat on first watch, which is a fair reminder that least interesting and least consequential aren’t the same thing. Watch that last cabin shot knowing exactly what it means.
Reed Is Scared and Franklin Is Waiting
First Steps is the film the whole run’s been walking toward, not because it’s the best of them but because it’s holding the pieces that matter. I barely mentioned the separate-universe thing in my 2025 review, it seemed like a convenience, and it’s nothing of the kind, because you need a separate universe before you can have an incursion story. And the Reed in this one’s the correct Reed. He’s anxious, over-prepared and visibly carrying the weight of everybody expecting him to solve everything, and that’s what makes the rivalry work. Doom against a serenely brilliant Reed is just two clever men arguing at each other. Doom against a Reed who’s quietly terrified of failing the people who depend on him is a real fight, because Doom’s whole proposition is that he’d do the job better.
Franklin’s the one I gave almost no attention first time round, which was a mistake. Anybody with a passing knowledge of the comics knows what that child could be, the film puts him on the board and then leaves him alone, and whether December uses him is the single most interesting open question going in. Nothing’s changed my mind about Galactus, who shows up as a problem to be solved rather than a fact to be survived, though the Silver Surfer’s still the best version we’ve had. The trailers have the Fantastic Four out of their own world already. In the July trailer and the January Wakanda teaser, Ben Grimm’s on a beach shaking hands with M’Baku, Shuri and the Dora Milaje with a wall of water standing behind them, and it’s about the strangest image Marvel’s given us. That retro-futurism was the visible evidence that it’s somewhere else, and the more distinct it looks, the more the collision’s going to cost.
Days of Future Past and the Grave That Should Stay Dug
Days of Future Past is the film that stops the Fox universe being one line. It repairs the timeline and restores the mansion, Jean, Scott and Xavier, then the franchise stops caring about the repair almost immediately, which turned out to be more productive than if it had worked. Apocalypse makes it messier and Logan does its own thing. I don’t think it explains how Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen get back, since it edits one timeline rather than crossing universes, so it isn’t a map of Doomsday. What it does prove is that audiences will accept two casts playing the same characters without the story collapsing, and Doomsday’s whole approach stands on that. The Sentinels are still the franchise’s best villain as well, which is useful to know when you see what Cyclops is up against in the X-Men teaser.
Logan is the film I’m most protective of as December gets closer. It’s one of the best comic book films anybody has made and I’ve stopped hedging about it. The scene in the motel where Xavier thanks Logan for a night that was almost nice is the best thing Stewart’s done across twenty-six years of playing him, and it’s close to unbearable. The Reavers are personal for me, I wanted more of them, but the villain was never the Reavers, it’s the adamantium. So Stewart coming back is the one part of this I’m uneasy about, even though the MCU’s already killed a different Xavier in Multiverse of Madness and that wasn’t him either. And then you get the July trailer, about 1:19 in, with Xavier sitting in front of stained glass across from somebody in a dark hood. It’s the shot I most want to see the rest of. Let this grave stay dug, though.
The Void and the Wrong Credits Scene
Deadpool & Wolverine is the film that opens the door. I wrote about it in 2024 as a Deadpool film with good taste in Fox references, and that badly undersells it. It establishes that pruned timelines exist and that people can come out of them, so the machinery for putting Stewart, McKellen and Grammer back on a screen is already built. The Void plays like a set for a third act, and it’s the most consequential thing in the movie. Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova is very nearly a distraction from it, and she’s comfortably the strongest antagonist of the era. Jackman’s Wolverine, defined by failure rather than fury, is less fun and a lot more interesting. Don’t expect the anchor-being rule to govern anything, though, because it was a device for one film’s plot and it’s been quietly left where it was.
The Marvels got to the mutants first and hardly anybody saw it. Its credits scene is a plan executed in completely the wrong place, the first concrete step toward Marvel’s biggest crossover sitting in its lowest-grossing release, with Monica crossing into a universe that’s got Grammer’s Beast in it. Monica’s still stranded with no explanation, and she made the crossing first. Iman Vellani’s still the best thing in that film and I’d say it more strongly now, Kamala deserved a better one and will hopefully get a bigger one. The other half of the picture is in the X-Men teaser, which spends most of its running time in a dark, empty mansion before you get a chessboard, Xavier and Magneto, and then Cyclops on his knees, firing at the huge dark shape of a Sentinel while everything burns. If you only read one of my posts on this, make it the X-Men foundation piece, because those two men are why any of it worked.
Loki Holds the Whole Thing Up
If you only watch one Marvel show before December, make it the first season of Loki. The TVA’s the most useful thing it does, and variants, branching timelines, pruning and the Void all get established so cleanly that Doomsday won’t need to explain them. Owen Wilson’s Mobius is the show’s quiet achievement. I’ve still got my complaints, every other variant’s male with no explanation and the romance doesn’t land emotionally, though I understand better now why the finale needs it. Because that finale’s the thing. Killing He Who Remains looked like a character beat in 2021, and knowing the branching led to incursions and worlds colliding, it plays as the single most consequential decision anybody in this franchise has ever made. A TVA badge turns up in somebody’s hand about a minute into the July trailer, so that department isn’t done either.
Season two is the weaker run of television, but its last twenty minutes are the best ending Marvel’s ever written for its best character, and then it declined to follow up on it in any meaningful way. The multiverse is intact because Loki’s personally holding it together. Every timeline that survives does so because a man sat down at the end of time and took the threads in his hands, which means the universes colliding in December are only there to collide because of a Disney+ finale nobody talks about much any more. I don’t want him pulled back into an ensemble film to throw daggers at Doom, that’d be a downgrade however well it’s staged. If December does bring him back, it needs to be for something only he can do, and it needs to cost him, because anything less turns that ending into a pause. And I’d want it acknowledged even if he stays put, because a sacrifice only means anything if the story admits it happened.
Shang-Chi’s Signal Is the Oldest Unpaid Bill
The post-credits scene of Shang-Chi is one of the strongest hooks in the whole pre-Doomsday run. The Ten Rings are far older than the thousand years everybody assumed, and they’re broadcasting to something, and five years on nothing’s explained who’s listening. It’s effectively a piece of homework Doomsday has to mark. A hook this good deserved its own story rather than being folded into an ensemble event as one thread among thirty, and that’s the disappointment I’m bracing for. Shang-Chi’s hardly been seen since his own film. Still, it’s the kind of unpaid bill this film’s going to be full of, and if there’s anywhere for it to land, it’s here.
Watch it for Wenwu as much as anything, because Tony Leung’s still the best villain in the MCU, and five more years of antagonists have widened the gap rather than closed it. He’s a quiet, grieving man being worked on through his loss, and that’s a smaller and sadder thing than almost anybody else on this list has been asked to play. The fights hold up too. That matters because of the moment about a minute into the July trailer when Shang-Chi and Gambit go through a room in a house full of stained glass, a charged card and a long glowing staff on one side and those gold bracers on the other, tearing up the furniture while the windows blow out. I don’t know why they’re fighting and I’d rather not. Seeing Gambit at all after this long is enough for me, and I’d like to think it’s more than a good bit of noise.
Thor Needs the Ragnarok Version
Ragnarok works because its comedy sits on real loss. Thor’s joking while he loses his hammer, his eye, his father and his planet, and the jokes land because the grief’s real. Asgard’s not a place, it’s a people, says the film, and then Infinity War opens on that same ship with most of those people dead on the floor. Later films kept the jokes and dropped what was underneath them, and Endgame’s where that first went wrong. Love and Thunder’s the worst of it, Hercules has never been seen again, Jane’s in Valhalla and hasn’t been mentioned since, and if you’re prioritising, it’s the most skippable film in the project. Gorr’s argument deserved better than getting raised and settled in one film. What I want in December is the Thor from Ragnarok, funny and formidable and quietly wrecked. And the July trailer gives him that hammer back, standing in a hangar with it near the end looking like a man who’s got something to prove.
That’s why the catch bothers me as much as it does, in a good way. It’s Thor at full power, every bit of lightning he’s got, and it’s the first thing we properly see Doom do to one of the old guard. If that’s the weightless Thor from Love and Thunder, it’s just a cool shot and we all move on. If it’s the one who’s already lost a hammer, a father and a planet, getting stopped dead by one hand ought to scare him, and it ought to scare us. I’d give up a fair few of the jokes for that.
Namor, Shuri and the Guardians Who Stayed Gone
Namor’s the wildcard. In 2022 he was the antagonist of a self-contained film with an unusually good argument behind him, and in 2026 he’s an unaligned power with an intact nation, a working military and no obligations to anybody at all. I called that treaty in Wakanda Forever bad ethics and good chess, and I’d still have liked the film to look harder at the body count. The funeral at the start is still the best thing it does, and Angela Bassett’s carrying the argument that Wakanda’s a country with obligations rather than a superhero base with a throne in it. Shuri’s the one who hasn’t worked out, and it isn’t her fault, because her real strength’s always been her brains and the suit forces her into being the brawn. Namor has a long history with Sue Storm in the comics that I’d love to see them touch. Using him as a cameo, one line and a trident, would be a waste.
The Guardians are the opposite problem. Vol. 3 ends with the team gone and it’s meant it, Rocket’s captaining a roster we haven’t followed, Peter’s on Earth, Drax and Nebula are raising the children they rescued. It stayed out of the multiverse altogether, and I’d revise myself on only one thing, which is that Warlock shouldn’t have been in the movie. The argument for bringing them back is obvious enough. Doomsday’s pulling in everybody, the cosmic side of this universe is badly underrepresented, and Rocket’s got the emotional weight to hold a scene against anyone. But drop them into an ensemble event and they become five more people in a crowd scene, and the thing that makes them worth watching doesn’t survive the format.
What to Watch and What to Look For
If you’re working through this before December, start with the two Loki seasons and WandaVision, since they set the rules. Then Multiverse of Madness, Quantumania for the Kang story that didn’t happen, and First Steps for Reed and Franklin. The X-Men run comes next, Days of Future Past, Logan and Deadpool & Wolverine together, then The Marvels for that credits scene. Finish with Thunderbolts and the Captain America films for the shield question, and leave Thor and the Guardians for last, since they’re the furthest from the main line. It won’t all be needed, I know, nobody ever required homework to enjoy Thor swinging a hammer at somebody, but it’s going to make that Xavier scene hit a lot harder. And Thunderbolts is worth your time for the Sentry alone. He’s either the solution to every threat or he has to be written out of every room he’s in, and that’s the one question December can’t avoid.
Then there’s what I’ll be watching for when the lights go down. Is Steve a fighter again, or a symbol, or does he just want to go home? Does Sam hold the shield as a soldier or a negotiator, and what’s Walker bring now he’s been through a team film? Franklin’s either going to do something or he’s waiting for a cue that never comes. And with this many actors coming back, I don’t know how the film keeps its own story at the centre, which might be the biggest ask of the lot.
Which of these setups do you most want Doomsday to pay off? Tell me in the comments.