After All the Marvel Denial, He Has Returned
Dread it, run from it, major Marvel Cinematic Universe casting news still arrives all the same.
On Tuesday morning, Marvel Studios released the first teaser poster and teaser trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, just a little less than a year before the blockbuster is set to make its debut in theaters. Instead of showing Robert Downey Jr.’s new franchise role as Doctor Doom, or any of the forty-plus characters whose names were on chairs during a livestream earlier this year, the footage takes a different approach. It confirms, without a line of dialogue and through small shots of footage, that Chris Evans is, in fact, returning in Steve Rogers.
In this Doomsday footage, Steve parks a motorcycle in front of a quaint-looking home. He holds up a blueish Captain America costume that is already drawing comparisons to his Nomad persona in the comics (which he didn’t technically take on while on the run in Avengers: Infinity War). And then, as the camera pulls back to reveal his face, he cradles a baby. It is, presumably, his child, who he had with Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) at some point after returning the Infinity Stones and then hiding away.
The idea of Steve Rogers possibly returning in Doomsday has been… something over the course of the past year. Around December of 2024, trade publications confirmed that Evans was in talks to appear in the movie, although an argument could be made that it would be as Johnny Storm / Human Torch (who he’d just reprised in Deadpool & Wolverine) or some sort of multiversal variant of a character. Evans himself denied the news soon after, but fans still theorized, especially after he was spotted at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this fall rocking his Marvel-esque “Dorito body” physique.
Is It Too Little, Too Late?
There’s, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot to unpack here… the first being the fact that we can now officially talk about Steve’s Doomsday teaser to begin with. The footage has been playing exclusively in theaters before showings of Avatar: Fire and Ash for almost a week now, resulting in a sea of high-quality leaks (and AI-generated recreations, which is a whole separate slippery slope) making their way online. Even if you were just passively online at some point in the past week, you probably saw a tweet or a headline confirming Evans’ return, if not a shoddy recording of the teaser itself.
That made waking up to Marvel Studios’ official post on Tuesday morning all the more surprising: not necessarily because of what it confirms, but because of the fact that a lot of the conversation around it had already happened before the studio actually joined in. A lot of the replies and reactions to the teaser confirm as much, with fans joking that they’ll “pretend” this is the first time they’re seeing it. The Hollywood Reporter confirms that there will be three more Doomsday trailers released with this strategy, each playing in Avatar showings for a week, so we’ll see how this cycle of discourse continues to evolve over time.
Part of that discourse, at least with the Steve-focused teaser, has concerned the nature of him returning in Doomsday at all. Could we safely theorize that we’ll see Evans in the movie, or in 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars, in some capacity? Of course, and the same can be said for the rest of the actors who played the original six Avengers, especially now that Downey is back in such a splashy way. But this minute of footage presents a bit of a double-edged sword: it follows up on the ending Steve got in Endgame, which was controversial among some fans upon the time of the movie’s release. (I still, personally, have trouble believing that Steve would give up actively saving the day to go play house in suburbia for decades.)
And the footage also complicates the way the mantle of Captain America is going to be received by the Doomsday audience. One of the first storylines of the post-Endgame Multiverse Saga surrounded who was going to take up the shield in Steve’s absence, with an entire Disney+ series devoted to Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) fully embracing the mantle. He anchored his own Captain America solo movie earlier this year, and is confirmed to be in Doomsday with a new team of Avengers who create a legal headache for the Thunderbolts/New Avengers. Is Sam going to get to shine as Captain America in a massive ensemble context, or is he going to get overshadowed by Steve, regardless of whether or not the latter actually uses his old mantle?
Doomsday directors Joe and Anthony Russo’s post of the teaser calls Steve “the character that changed our lives. The story that brought us all here together. It was always going to come back to this…” We still have to wait almost a year to see what that return looks like… but hopefully it will be worth it.
Avengers: Doomsday is set to be released exclusively in theaters on December 18, 2026.
(featured image: Marvel Studios)
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