is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
A little over a year ago, Marvel spent the better part of an entire day slowly revealing the massive cast for Avengers: Doomsday. More recently, the studio started dropping teaser trailers featuring some of the movie’s more notable superhero team-ups and returning characters. There was already plenty of hype around the project, which seems poised to rework a significant chunk of the MCU. But the House of Mouse wants to get fans foaming at the mouth for the Avengers’ biggest outing yet, so now there’s a clock counting down to the next time we’ll see them on the big screen — which is almost a year away.
Along with yet another teaser, this one focusing on Black Panther’s Shuri (Letitia Wright) and newly-crowked king M’Baku (Winston Duke) meeting The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), Marvel has posted a “Doomsday Clock” countdown video that will run out when Avengers: Doomsday premieres on December 18th.
The countdown doesn’t reveal anything that Marvel hadn’t previously announced, but it makes it pretty clear that the studio is banking on Doomsday — which will bring the Russo brothers, Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Evans back to the MCU — being a cultural event. Superhero fatigue might make that a little hard for the studio to pull off on its own, but that weekend is probably going to be wild given that it’s also when Dune: Part 3 hits theaters.