By Chris Snellgrove | Published
It’s been a crazy week for Marvel: originally, the studio intended to show the first Avengers: Doomsday trailer ahead of James Cameron’s superhero movie Image: Fire and Ashes. Unfortunately, a trailer was leaked online a few days ago, showing a few silent scenes of Steve Rogers (complete with old uniform and new kid) preparing to return to the superhero game.
It’s a weird and annoying trailer, and when I tried to figure out why, it hit me. Marvel is marketing Avengers: Doomsday to casual fans rather than those who have kept the studio running in recent years.
The trailer Marvel didn’t want you to see yet
If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, it mainly features Steve Rogers (the guy who was last seen jumping back in time at the end of . Avengers: Endgame) holding his infant son, sporting his old Captain America uniform, and riding a motorcycle, leading to the promise that “Steve Rogers Will Return in Avengers: Doomsday.” One reaction I kept seeing online was that fans should have been able to tell that this trailer was real because it was more disappointing than the bevy of AI trailers that contain endless cameos and life-or-death stakes. The more I looked, the more I realized that this was a common reaction on the Internet: confusion and disappointment.
I’ve been wondering why Marvel would drop the ball with the first look at their highly anticipated movie ever since Avengers: Endgame. Finally, I came to a startling conclusion: that Kevin Feige and some of these high-powered employees were marketers. Doomsday to casual audiences rather than die-hard fans. For those casual audiences, the most important part of this trailer was the promise that Steve Rogers (the original Captain America and a worldwide fan favorite) would return to the MCU.
Heroic Fatigue: The Real Big Bad
This, of course, is part of Marvel trying to combat superhero fatigue by returning to the creative source of what has worked in the past. Instead of bringing a new story with new characters, Marvel is giving it to us Civil War 2.0, with the former Captain America fighting Doctor Doom and Tony Stark’s face. Love The end of the game, Doomsday will prominently revolve around Rogers and Stark; like The end of the gamethe movie will also have a small army of cameos to gradually fill in the gray CGI that Marvel calls the action scene.
This trend will continue in the near future, hence the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday trailers will feature characters like Thor (another OG Avenger) and Doctor Doom (a new baddie wearing Tony Stark’s face). Although this marketing strategy may end up being successful (only time will tell Doomsday‘s box office looks), I can’t help but feel like Marvel is successfully marketing to the wrong fans. Rather than trying to appeal to a mainstream audience, the studio it should try to appeal to comic book diehards instead.
Marvel Ignores The Fans Who Keep Them Alive
After all, these are the diehards who keep Marvel Studios running even when hero fatigue replaces the same movies. Miracles for high-level bombs. These are fans who have many difficult questions about them Doomsdayincluding what the villain’s plans are, what his motivation is, and where Steve Rogers fits into all of this. Those fans would have liked a trailer with answers to these questions rather than just putting a familiar face on the screen.
I’m not saying this to the gatekeeper, and I certainly don’t want to be intruded upon by beards on the Internet who complain that another multimedia juggernaut (not the one powered by the Crimson Gem of Cytorrak) somehow ruined their childhood. But from a purely pragmatic point of view, Marvel it should it takes better care of its core fans as long as they become passionate brand ambassadors who draw their regular friends to the theater. Feeding only normie fans is a gamble because it assumes that they will come from a famous, well-known hero, as they did Deadpool and Wolverine.
However, superhero fatigue was enough to turn several MCU films into huge box office disappointments (including Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania again Captain America: Brave New World) and at least one (Miracles) in a direct bomb. This happened because the average moviegoer stopped caring about all these tight-and-flights events, while the diehard fans carried the impersonal torch and kept the lights on for Marvel. Here’s hoping for that DoomsdayFuture trailers do a better job of attracting fans and casual viewers alike, or this movie could be the kind of failure the studio will make. never he has recovered since.
