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With its enigmatic promo run for Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel has perfected the trailer that reveals precisely nothing. Teasers have consisted of portentous glances, mood lighting, and characters standing very still. Dialogue is pre-scrubbed of context. Music swells with the confidence that something enormous is happening just out of frame. Plot, meanwhile, has been placed in witness protection. The studio is clearly well aware that giving away even a smidgen of detail this early on – the film isn’t due for release until December – would result in fans cracking the code long before any bums actually go on seats.
After all, Marvel has been here before. Avengers: Infinity War’s trailers laid out just enough narrative scaffolding for the internet to calmly conclude, months in advance, that Thanos was going to win and leave the universe in binary tatters. And it happened again with Avengers: Endgame, a film whose storyline was deduced from toy leaks, casting announcements and the radical insight that actors rarely sign multi-picture deals only for their characters to die permanently.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that Doomsday nearly joined the list this week. The Russo brothers, who have returned to Marvel to direct the next two Avengers films, decided to launch a section on their website dedicated to crowd-sourced guesswork about Doomsday. But no sooner was it unveiled – alongside an accompanying video spotlighting the wildest plot ideas – than the entire project was wiped. Did somebody actually guess the whole thing? If so, they couldn’t have cooked up much to beat the following far-out fan theories currently rattling around the more unsupervised corners of the internet.
Doctor Doom is basically Tony Stark’s evil shadow
The more unhinged (and therefore more popular) version of this theory suggests Avengers: Doomsday will open by positioning Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom not as a villain at all, but as a heroic solution to the multiverse problem. Downey-Doom is instinctively trusted because he’s got Tony Stark’s face, and because we’ve all spent the best part of the last two decades being conditioned to believe that the man wearing it will build a machine that saves everyone at the last possible second. Sadly he is going to use that trust to stabilise Earth-616 according to his own principles, which probably involve him sitting on top of a giant throne looking down on everyone else in the known universe.
Steve Rogers breaks the universe by chilling out
The idea here is that Steve Rogers’ decision to live out a full, quiet life after returning the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame didn’t just bend the rules of time – it snapped them clean in half. The theory is that Rogers’ choice to remain in the past – to marry Peggy Carter, grow old and experience the kind of wholesome domestic bliss normally reserved for Christmas adverts – created a branching timeline so unstable it began quietly leaking chaos into the rest of existence.
Doom is hunting Cap’s baby, along with everyone else’s
An extension of the above – and one of the ideas explicitly floated before the Russo brothers’ fan-theory video disappeared – posits that Steve Rogers fathered a child whose very existence destabilises the multiverse. Doctor Doom’s mission, according to this theory, is to find the child and remove it from the timeline with extreme prejudice. The problem, as fans have delighted in pointing out, is that this is already a crowded market. The Marvel universe currently contains at least one other small, alarmingly powerful sprog in the form of Franklin Richards. If Doom is in the business of hunting multiverse-breaking toddlers, he is spoilt for choice. Chris Hemsworth’s Thor spends much of his own peculiar teaser footage speaking in solemn tones about legacy, his daughter’s future and what comes after gods, which has encouraged fans to ask whether Doomsday will be less an Avengers movie and more a grim scavenger hunt for whichever superhero offspring happens to vibrate at the wrong frequency. Does this mean that Doom, in a bizarre way, really is as heroic as Stark ever was?
The X-Men arrive via chaos, not introduction
Rather than debuting mutants in a neat origin story, some fans think Doomsday will use multiversal instability to retroactively introduce the X-Men. In this reading, Professor X and Magneto don’t enter the MCU from another reality but just appear as a byproduct of a universe that has glitched and reset; less an introduction, more just an administrative correction.
The movie ends by deleting the MCU itself
There seem to be at least as many Marvel turkeys as soaring successes and, thanks to all those Disney+ spin-offs, the universe has become too narratively congested to function. So the only solution is to shut everything down and start again, according to the boldest and most gleefully apocalyptic theory doing the rounds: that Avengers: Doomsday doesn’t just end a story but quietly deletes the Marvel Cinematic Universe altogether. Not with an explosion, or a sacrifice, but with a kind of cosmic factory reset.
Fans pushing this theory frame it as Marvel admitting defeat in its long war against against the narrative bloat it spent 18 years proudly accumulating. Doomsday, in this reading, becomes a controlled demolition, clearing away variants, loose ends and characters who technically died but may still be alive somewhere else, in order to relaunch the whole enterprise with fewer explanations. Reality will then restart (presumably via Avengers: Secret Wars) with the vague promise that this time, no one will kill off the main character and bring them back as the next film’s villain.
