Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday trailers are clearly setting up the biggest event in Marvel cinematic history, including a likely clash between the X-Men and the Avengers. Taking advantage of the box office success of Avatar: Fire & Ash, Marvel is releasing a weekly stream of new trailers that hint at the film’s scope and plot. So far, teasers have confirmed the return of Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers, revealed new costumes for the likes of Thor, Shuri, and Namor, and apparently confirmed the entire multiverse is facing potential death and destruction.
But the most exciting teaser is surely the X-Men’s Doomsday trailer, featuring Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier, Sir Ian McKellan’s Magneto, and James Marsden’s Cyclops. Other X-Men are confirmed, with recent reports even hinting at Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey. The trailer doesn’t exactly strike an optimistic note for the X-Men, though, with Professor X and Magneto discussing death while Cyclops seems grief-stricken – perhaps hinting his beloved Jean will be killed once again. All this is building up to the multiverse-ending Avengers: Secret Wars – but why are the X-Men playing such a major role?
Why Marvel Universes Are Colliding in Avengers: Doomsday
Marvel’s first steps into the multiverse were more than a little confused, and it fell to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to properly establish the reasons different dimensions will eventually collide. When Doctor Strange encountered another reality’s Illuminati, he learned they protected their world from multiversal events because they understood the risk of crossing between dimensions. According to that universe’s Reed Richards, the larger the footprint left behind in another universe, the greater the risk of an incursion.
“An incursion occurs when the boundary between two universes erodes, and they collide,” Reed explained. “Destroying one, or both, entirely.” The term was immediately familiar to anyway who follows the comics, where incursions were universe-ending collisions that led to the 2015 “Secret Wars” event. Avengers: Doomsday is literally setup for Avengers: Secret Wars, meaning it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to see an incursion affect the MCU. The focus on an X-Men reality suggests that’s the other universe in question; but why is the incursion happening?
The Answer Lies in The Marvels
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The answer, surprisingly, lies with The Marvels. Releasing in 2023, this Captain Marvel sequel failed to recoup its costs, grossing just $206.1 million against a reported budget of $374 million gross. The box office is only half the picture with The Marvels, of course, with the film debuting at number 1 in streaming charts and proving fairly successful on Disney+. Still, given the movie’s overall performance, it’s quite remarkable that one scene here is absolutely key to understanding Avengers: Doomsday.
The Marvels‘ post-credits scene revealed that Teyonah Parris’ Photon had been blasted across the multiverse, winding up in an X-Men dimension where she was being treated by Kelsey Grammer’s Beast. He played Beast in the original Fox X-Men movie timeline, and Grammer is confirmed to be reprising the role in Doomsday. Given all this, it’s reasonable to assume Photon is actually in the X-Men timeline we’ve just seen in the Doomsday teaser. Lacking multiversal powers of her own, she has no way home, and is sure to continue interacting with the X-Men (and her alt-universe mother, that universe’s Captain Marvel).
And here’s the catch; the longer Photon remains in that particular X-Men timeline, the more likely it is that an incursion will happen in which these two universes collide. The Marvels‘ post-credit scene is literally setup for an X-Men-Avengers event, an incursion between an X-Men reality featuring Fox characters and the main MCU timeline. Viewed through this lens, the Avengers: Doomsday teaser makes perfect sense; these two specific realities are colliding, both potentially facing destruction.
The Marvels may not have performed well at the global box office, but it’s still a crucial chapter in the history of the MCU. That post-credits scene is especially important, with the X-Men’s Doomsday teaser positioning it as something of a prologue. This is the beauty of a shared universe (and also, sometimes, its curse); everything matters, including the things audiences could easily overlook.
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