Avengers: Doomsday seems to be largely playing the hits, bringing back Chris Evans as the should’ve-been-retired Steve Rogers, casting Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom after he’d seemingly retired from the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Avengers: Endgame, and wrangling a slew of X-Men from the Fox movies. Those characters, such as Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and Ian McKellen’s Magneto, are the subject of the latest theater-exclusive Doomsday trailers playing in front of Avatar: Fire and Ash, and while it doesn’t beat the “fanservice nostalgia slop” allegations, it is a reminder that I am a mark first and a hater second because those are my superhero peepaws.
Shaky camera recordings from inside theaters have been uploaded on social media and taken down by Marvel almost immediately after. If you search for it on places like YouTube and X, you’ll probably stumble into a few AI mock-ups of them as slop content creators take advantage of the moment. But the gist of it is that we see some shots of a desecrated Xavier Institute, with Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr doing what they always do when they’re not locked in a battle of ideals: playing chess amidst the destruction.
The two hold hands with the passion and tenderness of decades-long friends-to-enemies-to-lovers as Magneto talks about the inevitability of death, but then this moment of homoeroticism is interrupted by two shots of Donut Lord himself James Marsden finally returning to the role of Cyclops for the first time since his brief cameo in 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past. He appears to be in a comic-accurate blue-and-yellow suit, which means that Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine isn’t the only X-Man getting some color in their wardrobe after mostly wearing the jet-black suits in the original Fox films.
THIS SHOT OF CYCLOPS IN AVENGERS DOOMSDAY X MEN TEASER!!!!
I’M SAT pic.twitter.com/EPAbW0dZBb
— . 🪐˖ (@Keplertweets) December 28, 2025
For now, this trailer is only playing in theaters before Avatar: Fire and Ash, but if the Steve Rogers teaser is anything to go by, Marvel will be uploading it in high quality on its YouTube channel in the coming days.