The Multiverse Saga is building to a climax with Avengers: Doomsday and next year’s Secret Wars. The journey hasn’t exactly been a smooth one, with Marvel forced to pivot from Kang the Conqueror to Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom – who, to be fair, is a more logical villain for a story that featured Doom in the comics. The first Doomsday trailer (combined with hype for Spider-Man: Brand New Day) has already proved we shouldn’t count the MCU out, despite stumbles over the last few years.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Yes, I’m excited about Doomsday. A lifelong X-Men fan, I’m thrilled at the prospect of seeing X-Men and Avengers together (or engaging in the traditional superhero beat-downs, as seems to be the case). And yet, little by little, I’m beginning to recognize a very strange problem with the film – or rather, I hope, the film’s marketing. Something’s gone wrong at Marvel Studios, and the impact is very visible indeed.
Avengers: Doomsday Has a Problem With Female Heroes
Let’s be honest: the MCU has never exactly had gender parity. There was only one female member of the OG Avengers, and Black Widow only got a movie of her own after her death. The first Doomsday concept art rang alarm bells for me, because even now – eighteen years after Iron Man took flight for the first time – it had 20 male heroes, and just 5 women. That was all the more staggering given it included X-Men characters, and the X-Men famously have some of the best, most well-developed female heroes in all of comicdom. Granted, Anna Paquin probably couldn’t reprise Rogue due to health reasons, but the absence of Halle Berry’s Storm and Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey is striking.
My concerns weren’t helped by an interview with EW at San Diego Comic-Con.
EW rightly declared Doomsday “the ultimate Marvel crossover,” before focusing in on characters who haven’t been confirmed for the film – or who are known to be absent. They started by asking about X-Men like Jean Grey, Storm, and Rogue, before moving on to Avengers like Captain Marvel and Scarlet Witch. The Russo brothers insisted “there are always surprises,” but do you notice the pattern? I don’t know whether EW‘s interviewers even realised at the time, but every single hero they asked about was female. Yes, there are “always surprises,” but these are the women; the male heroes are front and center, and the film is marketed as their story. The female ones are largely sidelined.
Why Has Marvel Made This Mistake?
It’s worth taking a step back and asking just what’s going on. Back in 2008, the MCU launched with a leadership team who believed viewers weren’t interested in female heroes; Marvel boss Ike Perlmutter is known for actively campaigning against them, and he’s largely the reason we didn’t get a Black Widow movie until after the character’s death. Post-2016, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige was let off the leash, and we soon got Captain Marvel and Black Panther (which features stunningly well-developed female characters), while the Ant-Man films expanded to include the Wasp. Initial signs were promising, with Black Panther and Captain Marvel each breaking $1 billion.
What happened next, though, is pretty tragic. Marvel began pushing more diverse characters, including more female superheroes, at a time when the studio doubled down on output and diluted its own brand – in large part because of poor writing and unfinished VFX. Worse still, this all coincided with the end of the superhero boom, and we’ve now moved into a time when only the biggest brands or the best-written stories get attention. All this is set against a cultural shift against diversity, and back towards sexualization of women (over in the comics, Marvel has even brought back the “Swimsuit Specials” that – just a decade ago – were seen as an embarrassing part of the publisher’s history).
And this brings us to Avengers: Doomsday, the “ultimate Marvel crossover” that – so far – has sidelined the female characters, relegating them to “surprises” rather than a core part of the narrative. That’s even the case where it doesn’t make any sense. Teyonah Parris has indicated her character Spectrum may not even be in the film, for example; but The Marvels‘ post-credits took Spectrum to the X-Men timeline. That event that should really be the actual cause of the multiversal collision, as the boundaries between those realities blur. If Spectrum is indeed absent, it’s a shocking decision on Marvel’s part.
Yes, I’m aware of all the controversy that’s been generated by Marvel’s attempt to improve representation; I’ve seen the “M-She-U” YouTubers too. But consider; the OG Avengers had a one-in-six ratio of men to women. Now, eighteen years later, marketing suggests we’re at one-in-five. That’s not exactly a promising sign, and the “ultimate Marvel crossover” deserves far better than this; Doomsday should be honoring everything that’s gone before, with female X-Men and Avengers standing in the spotlight as well as the male ones. Doomsday has a big problem here, and Marvel really need to do better.
What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
More Movies
-
Image courtesy of Sony Pictures -
Image Courtesy of Sony Pictures Releasing -
Image courtesy of Lionsgate
