Avengers: Doomsday has a clear path to success – if Marvel leans into an unexpected story
The studio needs to look to a particular '80s comic book series.
We now know that Avengers: Doomsday is likely to be based on the highly acclaimed Secret Wars comic from 2015, but Marvel would be better off taking inspiration from somewhere much sillier: the original Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars.
This 1984 series was the first time a comics company had brought all its top superheroes together into one big story, and it was created with the highest of all artistic aims in mind – selling action figures.
Marvel had done a deal with Mattel to produce a range of plastic toys based on its characters, and both companies agreed that a new series would be a great sales gimmick. Market researchers asked adolescent boys what they thought the two most exciting words in the world were, and after removing some of the ruder responses the answers were "Secret" and "Wars", so that was the title.
The story was written with a similar focus, with each of the 12 issues featuring several big fights which you could re-enact only if you had enough action figures to bash together. There was also at least one scene where all the characters stood in a line and introduced themselves, just so that new readers would know which ones to ask for at Christmas.
This would be particularly useful for the modern MCU. After 35 movies and 17 years we could all do with scenes where characters say: "Hello everyone, I’m Namor the fish bloke and this is my pal M'Baku from Black Panther."
Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars contained plenty of other great ideas, like exciting team-ups, sci-fi bulldozers, brand new costumes (with associated action figures) and, in issue four, the baddies dropping a billion ton mountain range on top of the heroes. Who wouldn’t want to see that on the big screen?
Silliness like this is a vital part of superhero storytelling, allowing us to accept grand concepts and cosmic ideas because we've already gone along with people in skin tight costumes chucking cars at each other.
Unfortunately this makes some very serious and grown-up directors ashamed of their source material, because they think bigger boys and film critics will tease them. Making movies for boring people leads to boring movies, with the prime example being Zack Snyder's angst-ridden epics which, at heart, were still about a flying Space Jesus and a tooled-up Elon Musk.
The trailer for James Gunn’s Superman recognises this, revelling in the glorious silliness of Krypto the Superdog and his doggy cape, while his Guardians of the Galaxy movies extracted high excitement and big emotions from a talking racoon and his best friend who is a tree.
The early MCU embraced this too, with the utter daftness of billionaires building their own giant robot suits and a military superweapon waltzing about in the least camouflaged uniform ever. Avengers: Endgame even had a final punch-up that had to keep pausing for characters to say: "Hello it is me, Gwyneth Paltrow from the Iron Man films."
Excitingly, the new cast list reveals another similarity to the original Secret Wars. Both have four separate teams of superheroes - the Avengers, the X-Men (with Professor X and Magneto returning from the original X-Men movies), the Fantastic Four, and a group of baddies, here represented by the cast of Thunderbolts.
In the comics, these teams were constantly getting into misunderstandings and fights before finally being brought together by none other than Doctor Doom. Doom was the hero of the 2015 Secret Wars as well, although only the '80s one had him growing to a 30-foot-tall giant with a futuristic new costume that just so happened to be available from all good toy shops.
Importantly, the original series also had Doom curing his facial scarring and taking his mask off. This would be hugely appealing for the Disney accountants, who surely wouldn’t want to pay several million dollars to hide Robert Downey Jr's expensive face behind a bit of metal.
And that’s surely the key point. Despite what comics superfans think, Disney isn’t making these movies just to annoy us - it's also doing it to make money, just like the original series was.
When Marvel announced the follow-up to the original Secret Wars at a retailers conference in 1985, it was roundly booed for running out of new ideas. Its sales manager Carol Kalish waited for quiet and then said: “Let's be honest. Secret Wars was crap, right? But did it sell?"
The room erupted in cheering, and sales went through the roof. If the modern MCU can learn from this, maybe without deliberately making the movie rubbish, then they might find similar results from a dive back into daftness.
Avengers: Doomsday is coming to cinemas in May 2026.
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