Marvel's team-by-team Doomsday teasers are smart, but only a story can seal the deal

What do you do when audiences have stopped believing that every Marvel movie is an event? If you're Marvel Studios, you stop shouting "everyone is here" and start introducing the guests one by one.

That is how we read the rollout of Avengers: Doomsday. Omelete reports that in January the studio released a teaser bringing together Wakanda and the Fantastic Four. As Estadão noted, earlier teasers had already focused on Steve Rogers, Thor and the X-Men, part of a method of releasing one-off pieces with different elements of the film. Then, on July 20, came the big trailer with everybody in the same frame.

The drip-feed is a trust exercise, not just a hype machine

The obvious reading is that Marvel wants a new headline every week. We think there's something more interesting going on. The big July trailer got a mixed reception. Esquire's writer admitted to being a Marvel-weary fan who was tempted back, while one critic quoted by Revolt complained that it was "literally just things happening with no buildup." That is the core problem: the franchise no longer gets credit for assuming we care.

Team-by-team marketing looks to us like a way to earn that credit back. Each group gets its own spotlight, its own tone and its own question. Why is Wakanda meeting Ben Grimm? What state are the X-Men in, if Xavier's school sign is lying in rubble? Those are small hooks, and small hooks are easier to believe in than a mega-promise of "the biggest crossover ever."

It may also fit the structure the film seems to have. Reading the main trailer, Legião dos Heróis suggests the heroes get split into smaller groups, with one team seeking help from Wakanda and Namor. If so, teasers by team are not just a campaign choice. They could preview how the movie works.

Three universes is a pitch; one story is a promise

Here is where we get skeptical. Disney itself describes the film as putting heroes from "three distinct universes" on a collision course, per Revolt. The cast list in Rolling Stone Brazil runs from the original Avengers to the New Avengers, the Fantastic Four and returning X-Men from the Fox films. That is a lot of people who each need a reason to be in the room.

Separate teasers flatter that arrangement, because each team looks great alone. The risk is that the movie behaves like the marketing: a series of team showcases stapled together. Nostalgia can carry a trailer cut. We doubt it can carry a full feature if the characters merely cross paths. One Reddit reaction put it bluntly, saying the footage leans on nostalgia for characters without gravitas. That is one fan's opinion, but it names the danger.

What would solve it? A spine. The trailer hints at one: incursions, colliding realities and a villain, Robert Downey Jr.'s Doom, who narrates with unsettling calm. If every team's arc ties back to that threat, the drip-feed will look like careful planning. If not, it will look like a cast list in installments.

The competition makes the stakes higher

Esquire calls the film a make-or-break moment for Marvel and notes that it opens the same weekend as Dune: Part Three, which has reportedly seized all available IMAX screens. Disney is meanwhile launching "Infinity Vision," its premium large-format certification. Doomsday cannot rely on being the only event in town.

In that context, patient marketing is the right instinct. Overselling a mess is, in our view, how the studio lost goodwill; selling pieces of a coherent whole is how it could regain it.

Our verdict

The team-by-team strategy is the smartest thing Marvel has done with this film so far, because it treats the audience as people to be convinced rather than customers to be herded. But it is only a promise. If you're on the fence, our advice is to enjoy the teasers as appetizers and hold judgment until the first reviews. The marketing has made us curious again. Only the Russo brothers, and a script that gives all these teams a reason to share one story, can make us believe.