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In terms of building hives of buzz, no one in Hollywood does casting announcements quite like Marvel. On Friday, toward the conclusion of the first full day of the biennial Disney fan extravaganza D23, Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige ascended the stage at Anaheim’s Honda Center to deliver a speed round of movie date announcements, trailer reveals and casting coups. Each of them exploded out of the Inland Empire and rampaged across social media — even as the announcements had the unintended effect of raising more questions than they answered.
First, Feige showcased a foreboding new trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, the 39th Marvel Cinematic Universe feature and highest-stakes title in a generation from Disney’s superhero studio division, set to reach multiplexes December 18. It features Vanessa Kirby’s Fantastic Four character Sue Storm/Invisible Woman gravely intoning to a collection of Earth’s mightiest enhanced humans — Channing Tatum’s Gambit, Chris Evans returning as Captain America, Ian McKellen’s lank-haired Magneto, Simu Liu as Shang-Chi and interim Black Panther Letitia Wright among them — about the “broken” supervillain Doctor Doom. (That is, erstwhile Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. returning behind a different metal mask.) “For the first time ever, we’ll see the Avengers, we will see the Fantastic Four and the original X-Men together on screen,” the Marvel Studios president announced to wild whooping and hollering.
Adding that “nearly everyone from our cinematic universe” will be included in the fifth Avengers installment, however, Feige was interrupted by a sheepish Hugh Jackman — beaming in via video and clearly being coached through his talking points by his off-screen Deadpool & Wolverine co-star Ryan Reynolds. “Just wanted to check in totally unprompted. And wondered if you might need some help,” Jackman said brightly. “If you need some help rounding out the cast, I’d love to join!”
Then, as a kind of coup de grace to the two-hour, shock-and-awe presentation — one that also hyped the upcoming release of a live-action Lilo & Stitch 2 (drop date May 2028), Pixar’s Incredibles 3 (June 2028), Coco 2 (November 2029), Star Wars’ Shawn Levy-Ryan Gosling joint Starfighter (next May) and the Paul Bettany-led Disney+ series VisionQuest (October) — Feige delivered the biggest news of the weekend. In front of the Honda Center’s 12,000-person throng, he unveiled the ncast members of the new X-Men: Kit Connor as Scott Summers/Cyclops, Samara Weaving as Emma Frost, Inde Navarrette as Rogue and Broadway star Maya Boyd as Ororo Munroe/Storm. As well as the two ur-bad boyfriends from HBO’s Girls Christopher Abbott and Adam Driver who will portray, respectively, Professor Charles Xavier and Nathaniel Milbury/Mister Sinister. (Directed by Thunderbolts* filmmaker Jake Schreier, X-Men is scheduled to hit theaters May 2028.) “Kevin and I have been talking for years about me joining MCU,” Driver said via taped video from an empty soundstage in the UK, adding he felt the project is “something perfect with characters I feel very deeply about.”
It’s an automatic headline that Oscar-nominated, sexy yet Serious Thespian™ Driver would lend his twitchy Kylo Ren malevolence to being the new Marvel bad guy (following in the footsteps of fellow Serious Thespians™ Michael Fassbender and Ian McKellan who gnashed their teeth for the Cinematic Universe and cashed those Disney paychecks before him). And while the reveal of a passel of young, fresh X-Men within moments of showcasing yesteryear’s X-Men in a splashy trailer would seem to indicate a certain non-linearity in terms of MCU Phase 7 storytelling, the crowd in Anaheim ate it up.
Easy enough to forget, then, the controlled fan hysteria that greeted the announcement of the new Fantastic Four cast — Kirby, Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn — in 2024. Like this impending X-Men, 2025’s retro-futurist Fantastic Four: First Steps united a Marvel Comics-branded intellectual property that had long been exploited for movie content by 20th Century Fox under a Marvel Studios-Disney banner for the first time. The upshot? Meh. Racking up decent-ish reviews yet undershooting financial expectations, the Fantastic Four reboot grossed $521.8 million worldwide against a reported $200 million budget — narrowly missing break-even when you factor in $125 million to $150 million in studio marketing costs.
Which is all to say that splashy casting announcements are one thing, but making actual hits is all in the execution. Exhibit B: before 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine became the top-grossing R-rated movie of all time, Jackman’s adamantium-clawed character wasn’t exactly that hottest of hot stuff. His solo outings — 2013’s The Wolverine, X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the Academy Award-nominated Logan (2017) — were solid box-office performers but ultimately disposable entertainments; hardly the kind of Thanos snap-level event film Avengers: Doomsday is aiming to be.
And on the heels of a string of MCU box-office underachievers — Thunderbolts*, FF: First Steps and Captain America: Brave New World — Marvel desperately needs to remind Hollywood that it is still in the hits business. (Even as Gen Z and Generation Alpha gravitate towards video-game movie adaptations and increasingly regard superhero fare with an OK, Boomer disregard.) But while plotting Doomsday around a battle royale utilizing the combined might of the Fantastic Four, X-Men and Avengers may make sense on a corporate level, anecdotal evidence suggests modern audiences may be turning away from such mega-budget-for-its-own sake superhero gigantism.
The brain trust behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day (which is a co-production between Sony and Marvel Studios) deliberately leaned into a human-scaled story plotted around Peter Parker’s growing isolation. Where its forerunner Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) featured multiverse-jumping characters, fissures in the time-space continuum and global mass amnesia caused by a galactic sorcerer, Brand New Day featured Spider-Man in more relatable situations (like accidentally getting shot with a high-caliber rifle by his friend, Jon Bernthal’s Punisher). “The audience doesn’t care how much a movie costs,” Sony’s motion picture group chief executive Tom Rothman recently told me. “They don’t care about all the razzle-dazzle. They care about what it makes them feel. So we decided instead of going bigger to go deeper. To go more emotional. More character driven.”
In Navarrette’s casting as Rogue, there was an implicit acknowledgement of the kind of shifts in consumer sentiment Marvel may be worrying about — away from IP-reliant spectacle towards something more homegrown and hand-spun. The Tucson-born actress toiled in relative obscurity with small film and TV roles before making her breakthrough with filmmaking phenom Curry Baker’s micro-budget demon-love horror movie Obsession. That $750,000 first feature has obliterated all box-office expectations, grossing a staggering $488 million worldwide to become the industry’s biggest success story. Obsession also upset Lucasfilm’s critically and commercially misbegotten Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, out-earning the highly anticipated series spinoff by more than $140 million. By elevating Navarrette to the next career level, call it a case of if you can’t beat ‘em, join them (or at least cast them).
The business strategy for modern superhero blockbusters nowadays is capital-I iteration. Keep rebooting these movies over and over with fresh faces so younger fans can keep throwing new money at old properties ad infinitum. The question for Marvel is: can the studio still deliver movies with something more than reheated characters and empty razzle-dazzle?
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