Marvel Studios is entering a delicate phase as its upcoming blockbuster, Avengers: Doomsday, arrives in theaters on December 18. The studio has released six major trailers, along with numerous short teasers and TV spots. Doomsday's next trailer will likely be the final one, and it could easily be the deciding factor in whether the film hits $3 billion. The Wanda Maximoff post-credits scene in the VisionQuest finale proved how big an impact a single scene can have on a Marvel movie, with her return spiking Doomsday ticket sales when the episode aired on Tuesday, November 10.
Avengers: Doomsday's next trailer needs to feature at least six important elements to boost the success of the movie, which is basically a guaranteed hit at this point after raking in over $125 million in ticket pre-sales. But success is measured very differently when it comes to Marvel Studios and the Avengers franchise. Even $2 billion would count as a major underperformance for Doomsday in a franchise where the latest entry almost always outperforms the previous one.
Only Avengers: Age of Ultron posted slightly lower numbers than its predecessor, which speaks to the box office prowess of the Avengers movies. Avengers: Endgame is currently the highest-grossing movie in film history, with a $2.925 billion haul aided by the Avengers: Endgame Encore re-release. Doomsday outperforming Endgame means it needs to make at least $3 billion, which is no small feat, but its next trailer could push it across the line if it features the elements below.
Everything Avengers: Doomsday's Next Trailer Needs to Boost the Film's Success
A Glimpse of Doom's Motivation
Audiences know Doctor Doom is powerful, but what is still not clear is why exactly he is doing any of this. The trailers so far have sold him as a force of nature, offering only teases of what drives him, notably the mural glimpsed in his throne room. The best Avengers movies are driven by their villains' motivations, and Avengers: Infinity War understood this perfectly.
Its trailers heavily teased Thanos' chilling mission, with Gamora even telling Tony Stark in one scene that the Mad Titan wants to gather all six Infinity Stones and wipe out half the universe with the snap of his fingers.
Several scenes showed Thanos placing the stones in the gauntlet, exuding a menacing aura that sent the movie's hype through the roof. It is not enough that we see Doctor Doom stopping Stormbreaker with two fingers. Audiences need to make a personal connection with the villain they are being introduced to, and answering the question of why he's a bad guy goes a long way.
Spider-Man
As already stated, Elizabeth Olsen's Scarlet Witch just proved that giving fans the character they want to see gets them to buy tickets. The Marvel character with the biggest draw is Spider-Man, and Tom Holland's last MCU solo movie proved how beloved the web-head is. Spider-Man: Brand New Day earned $2.52 billion worldwide this summer, becoming only the third film in history to cross $2.5 billion, making the character bigger than ever.
The Spider-Man franchise can go toe to toe with the Avengers at the box office, which sums up how influential he is. If Marvel wants to make $3 billion, a glimpse of Peter Parker in the final trailer is guaranteed to crash ticket websites, sending fans who were still on the fence rushing to secure seats.
Marvel could take things up a notch if it reveals that Doom has recruited Peter as well, alongside Hulk and the Scarlet Witch. There is precedent for this, as the Brand New Day post-credits scene revealed Spidey was mysteriously off-planet, and the only logical explanation is that he is in Doom's orbit.
Stakes That Feel Real
What made Infinity War so successful was how big and emotional the stakes were. Half of all life was on the line, with the Avengers facing a level of danger they had never dealt with before. Doomsday needs to do that as well on a much bigger scale, with the trailers showing the multiverse falling apart.
The teasers have already depicted Doom as a villain almost impossible to defeat, but what are the consequences of facing an antagonist this powerful? The earlier X-Men teaser did an incredible job of making the audience feel the stakes at hand, and it did not even feature Doctor Doom.
For some fans, it remains the best trailer to date. It showed the X-Mansion in complete ruin and ended with Cyclops screaming and unleashing an optic blast in agony, giving off an extreme sense of loss and grief while also teasing the presence of the Sentinels. Emotion is the best way to highlight how big the stakes are, and the next trailer needs more of it.
We already know incursions are on the cards, so the trailer could show one happening in real time, specifically the incursion between the Earth-1005 and Earth-1127 universes revealed in the Endgame Encore post-credits scene. That incursion was visualized abstractly, but footage of its consequences playing out in real time would make viewers understand how devastating an incursion can be and why they should care that these heroes have to deal with a disaster on such a scale.
Deadpool (and Wolverine)
Deadpool & Wolverine grossed $1.34 billion and is the second highest-grossing R-rated movie ever made. That is an enormous audience Doomsday could benefit from if the two title characters make an appearance. Marvel already teased the pair at D23, where Hugh Jackman sent in a surprise video message begging for a spot in Doomsday while Ryan Reynolds egged him on off-screen. The bit got a huge reaction, but neither has been glimpsed in any actual footage yet.
The next trailer could be the perfect place for that first look. Channing Tatum's Gambit is already in the film, which gives Marvel a natural bridge to that corner of the multiverse. Even a two-second shot of Deadpool breaking the fourth wall or Wolverine's claws snikting out of the shadows would dominate headlines for at least a week.
More Humor
The Doomsday campaign has been almost relentlessly somber, which is understandable with Doom approaching. Most of the teasers depicted grief and loss, with the Russo Brothers even teasing a horror-tinged flick recently. Doomsday being dark is a great direction, but it also needs to have heart like the previous successful Avengers movies. For Marvel, that has always meant a touch of humor. One of its TV spots featured a hilarious Captain America joke from Paul Rudd's Ant-Man, and the next trailer could do with a few more of those.
Ant-Man, Red Guardian, and a couple of characters aside, everybody else seems a tad too serious in this movie. Even Thor, who used to crack some of the MCU's best jokes, is not kidding around anymore and only means business.
Again, this is not a bad thing, but at the end of the day, it is an Avengers movie. Humor has to be in its DNA, and a decent amount of it would not hurt anybody or take away from the seriousness of the stakes. Thanos was wiping out half of all life in Infinity War, and that film still had room for jokes. Even in Endgame, amid so much loss of life, humor persisted.
Allude to Robert Downey Jr.
Marvel's smartest marketing move so far has been keeping the scarred face of Robert Downey Jr.'s Doom hidden. Doom's mask has stayed on through every teaser, trailer, and poster, and the mystery is clearly deliberate. The only time Downey took off the mask throughout this promo campaign was at San Diego Comic-Con in 2024, where he was unveiled as the face behind the Latverian monarch. That moment made headlines and had fans talking for weeks, and Marvel could pull off a similar moment with the final trailer.
The footage could linger on Doom slowly reaching for his mask. It could cut to a hero's horrified reaction as the mask comes off, letting audiences fill in the blanks without spoiling one of the movie's biggest reveals. Ideally, this could be one of the Fantastic Four members, probably Sue Storm, seeing for the first time what the man they once knew had become, and later describing his scarred face to the other heroes.
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.
