FISCHER: Actors assemble

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

Well, I guess we know who is going to be in “Avengers: Doomsday.”

Maybe. Kinda. I guess.

Even though the movie is still more than a year away, Marvel Studios has already started up the hype-train. The casting announcement was made last week via a nearly six hour live stream that gradually revealed the names of each actor displayed on a movie set chair, panning the camera from one chair to the next every ten minutes or so.

I get what they were going for with the stunt.

They want people to talk about “Doomsday.” They want the internet checking in throughout the day to see who the next name to be revealed is. They want social media algorithms getting spikes of activity with every new name.

Most importantly, they want the MCU to return to the forefront of the general public conscious, the way it was back when the franchise was at the height of its popularity.

I don’t blame them for the effort, though I’m not sure how successful the attempt was. I’m pretty dialed into the goings on of the pop culture world and I didn’t even know the live stream was happening until it was over.

Moreover, having seen the cast list, I’m not super sure what exactly it is we were all supposed to be getting excited about.

It’s not exactly a surprise that the next big Avengers movie will feature the Avengers, so the presence of Chris Hemsworth and Anthony Mackie was expected. It’s also not shocking that the movie featuring Doctor Doom would include the Fantastic Four, so that casting announcement was kind of a given already. And it is a big crossover movie event, so of course characters from Shang-Chi, Black Panther, and “The Thunderbolts” will play a part.

Finally, this is the Multiverse Saga, and I’ve got hat from ComicCon that proves it, so while I certainly welcome the return of actors from the X-Men movies, that’s not a secret that Marvel has been holding particularly close to the chest. Marvel Studios has been drip-feeding the Fox X-Men characters into the MCU since Disney bought them back in 2019.

Out of the 27 actors announced to be in the movie, there isn’t a single one that is particularly surprising. There’s nothing we know about the movie today that couldn’t have been assumed a week ago.

Heck, there isn’t even anything we can surmise about the movie based on who didn’t make it into the announcement.

Teyonah Parris, the actress that plays Photon, didn’t get a chair, but seeing as her character was last seen chatting with an alternate reality version of Kelsey Grammer’s Beast I’d be surprised if she doesn’t appear.

Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman were also absent, but come on. If they aren’t in Part 1 of the Multiverse Saga climax, they’ll assuredly be in Part 2.

Will Tom Holland’s Spider-Man swing in for a cameo? Maybe?

Will Chris Evans cover his face in prosthetics again so we can finally learn what old man Steve Rogers has been up to? I wouldn’t bet against it.

Will the movie feature new actors playing new characters yet to be announced? Almost certainly.

Once upon a time I was all about picking apart every announcement and trailer for clues about what to expect before the latest MCU entry, but I’ve long since learned that’s mostly a futile effort. You can’t even trust trailers anymore since it’s become a regular practice to tweak them to avoid spoilers.

Marvel Studios isn’t run by incompetent amateurs. They take control of the flow of information about their movies more seriously than the secretary of defense does about military air strikes.

Whatever happens, we’re not going to know until the movie opens. We’ll know what Marvel wants us to know and we won’t know what they don’t want us to know.

Which is probably how it should be, but it does make riding the hype-train a little less fun.

— Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and is crossing his figures that James Marsden will finally get a real chance to shine as Cyclops.