The first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday got fans excited for the next chapter in the MCU but was also quickly picked apart for feeling like an expensive game of “let’s remember some people.” One of the major critiques was that it felt like Marvel was pushing another Infinity War-style showdown without having done any of the work to build up the stakes. Some fans argued that Thanos was allowed space and time to grow into a major villain while the pivot to Robert Downey, Jr.’s Doctor Doom feels rushed. The head of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, thinks those fans are misremembering the introduction of Thanos.
“I’m never confident about anything, I just work hard to try to deliver,” Feige said during a brief interview with Brandon Davis on the floor of San Diego Comic-Con 2026. “But I will say I do think–I was just saying to somebody else–that the Thanos buildup has built up in people’s heads over the years. He sat on a chair at the end. He pulled a gauntlet out and said, ‘I’ll do it myself.’ And he yelled at Ronin on a video screen briefly and that was kind of it.”
Fiege continued, “And I remember the memes making fun of Thanos for just sitting in a chair, and all he does is sit on a chair, and there was a Twitter feed at the time about him updating every day, updating. I’m still sitting in my chair. I’m still it–was more clever than that, but it was funny–and when we got to Infinity War, we said this is really the introduction of Thanos to people. That’s really what we’re doing. That’s how that movie was built. That’s what we’re doing with Doom. Doomsday is a introduction and the story of Doom. You peel the onion, you learn things about him as you go. And it is very much meant for audiences that know and love him from the comics and audiences who have no clue who he is.”
Feige is right that Thanos had no real screen time prior to Avengers: Infinity War. But the MCU had also been pointing to his eventual arrival and motivation for years. The mid-credits scene at the end of the first Avengers back in 2012 was the first cryptic hint about Thanos and the Infinity Stones. Marvel continued peeling back the curtain in 2014’s The Guardians of the Galaxy (talking to Ronin on a screen) and 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron (“I’ll do it myself”). That was six years of letting the character gestate in the minds of audiences before Avengers: Infinity War in 2018.
By comparison, the first mention of Robert Downey, Jr.’s Doom came at Comic-Con 2024. He then appeared in a mid-credits sequence for 2025’s Fantastic Four. And if it hadn’t been delayed, Doomsday would have already been out in theaters this past May. While you certainly don’t need to have nearly a decade of multi-franchise build-up for a villain to have them deliver, there’s no way around the fact that the MCU quickly pivoted from a set of movies oriented around Jonathan Majors’ Krang being the big bad to something different.
Going from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to Doomsday in just three years is very different from the plan for Thanos, even if fans at the time mocked that build-up for taking too long. On the one hand, that’s fine. A movie should be able to stand on its own 90-150 minute storytelling, regardless of the breadcrumbs scattered across half a dozen other Disney products. But the first Avengers: Doomsday trailer we got was not for that kind of movie. So we’ll see how it all ends up this December with Avengers: Secret Wars following just a year later.