A new Avengers: Doomsday promo has teased the return of Benedict Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange, showing his famous Sling Ring portals in action. The golden energy portals let their wielder travel anywhere in an instant, and they have come in handy in the Avengers films, with Strange and Wong using them to ferry the Blip's victims into the final battle in Avengers: Endgame.
Marvel Studios teamed up with American automaker Jeep for its latest Avengers: Doomsday promo. The ad features Fantastic Four members the Thing, Johnny Storm, and HERBIE, alongside Captain America, and gives fans their best look yet at the Avengers Tower in Doomsday. HERBIE can be seen driving one of the vehicles on the premises, hitting the max A/C option to keep his robot body cool. The camera then pans to the Thing racing through the Wakandan desert in a red Jeep Gladiator, before the vehicles in Jeep's lineup teleport away through Sling Ring portals.
Ads like these are rarely an indication of what actually happens in the movie, especially from a studio like Marvel that keeps secrets from even its own actors. Still, no character confirmed for Doomsday specializes in the Sling Ring, so their appearance here is intriguing, and it could well be Marvel Studios teasing the return of Doctor Strange and Wong alike.
Doctor Doom is one of the most powerful magic users in the MCU, so it's entirely possible he's capable of creating similar portals, although this hasn’t been confirmed.
Strange's road to Avengers: Doomsday has been a rocky one, leaving fans unsure whether he would feature at all. Cumberbatch told Variety in January 2025 that the character was simply not "aligning with this part of the story," explaining that plans changed after Jonathan Majors was fired. Days later at Sundance, he walked the comment back, saying, "I got that wrong, I am in the next one." He even added, with a smirk, "Don't ever believe anything I say." Yet when Marvel's March 2025 cast-reveal livestream unveiled 27 director's chairs, none of them bore his name.
There Are More Signs That Doctor Strange Appears in Avengers: Doomsday
Beyond this Jeep ad, there are a couple more signs pointing to Strange appearing in the fifth Avengers film. During the Easter festivities back in April, Robert Downey Jr. shared the biggest hint yet, posting artwork of Doctor Doom holding a basket of Easter eggs painted with the symbols of multiple MCU characters. One egg, tucked in the corner of the basket, featured Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum, its iconic window front and center.
More recently, rumors of Strange serving as an acolyte of Doctor Doom have run rampant, and Marvel concept artist Jorge Molina added fuel to the fire. He shared new Doomsday artwork, created for a Magic: The Gathering crossover card, featuring a character known as Boris Karela standing beside Doom.
This Boris is masked, but his headgear features a conspicuous hole in the middle, as if to make way for a third eye like the one Strange grew in Multiverse of Madness. Notably, Boris is Doom's most loyal servant in the comics, and fans suspect the MCU is, as it so often does, remixing his origin and putting Strange under the mask.
When asked about the figure, though, Molina said the character was removed from the film, which could mean Boris is genuinely cut, or simply that Marvel wants the reveal kept under wraps. In Jonathan Hickman's 2015 Secret Wars comic, a key inspiration for the film, Strange serves as Doom's right-hand man in Battleworld, lending further credence to the theory.
The film's strong multiversal premise also makes it hard to imagine without Strange. After all, his second solo outing dove deeper into the multiverse than any other chapter of the Multiverse Saga. At the end of that movie, Charlize Theron's Clea pulled him through a portal to fix an incursion he caused. That post-credits scene feels too important to Doomsday's plot for the MCU to leave unresolved, especially with three worlds on the brink of an incursion.
Geraldo Amartey is a writer at The Direct. He joined the team in 2025, bringing with him four years of experience covering entertainment news, pop culture, and fan-favorite franchises for sites like YEN, Briefly and Tuko.
