Doomsday Is Officially Doing Avengers vs. X-Men

Avengers: Doomsday is the movie viewers have dreamed of seeing ever since the MCU began. It’s easy for modern audiences to forget, but the early MCU didn’t have Marvel’s biggest characters to hand. Heroes like Iron Man and Captain America may be considered top-level heroes now, but they’d previously been secondary to the likes of the X-Men and Spider-Man. Unfortunately, the popularity of those heroes meant Marvel had long since sold their film rights (to Sony and 20th Century Fox, respectively). That’s why the X-Men and the Avengers remained separate on the big screen.

Everything changed in 2019, when Disney bought Fox. Spider-Man had already become part of the MCU through a separate deal, but now the rights to the X-Men were back at Marvel. Since then, mutants have become part of the mainstream MCU (Ms. Marvel was officially the MCU’s first confirmed mutant). Even more excitingly, the Multiverse Saga has provided a way to bring Fox’s X-Men into the fold – and it’s all heading up to Avengers: Doomsday. But, as we learn more, it’s becoming clear this is no team-up.

We’re Headed For Avengers Vs. X-Men

First Avengers: Doomsday footage released at CinemaCon (although it’s yet to be shared online). This confirmed an adventure of epic scale, revealing just how dangerous Robert Downey, Jr.’s Doctor Doom will be in a stunning shot where he caught Stormbreaker between two fingers. Even more excitingly, though, it confirmed that we’re not headed for a team-up between the X-Men and the Avengers; instead, we’re going to get a versus match. The footage included Mystique versus Yelena Belova’s Black Widow, as well as Gambit taking on Shang-Chi. No doubt this is only a teaser.

Superhero team-ups have always tended to begin with all-out brawls, a tradition running all the way back to the 1960s. Fandoms are naturally adversarial, meaning superhero fans long to know whether Superman is stronger than the Hulk, whether Cyclops can outsmart Captain America, and whether Mr. Fantastic is smarter than Iron Man. The X-Men and the Avengers have a terse relationship in the comics, which means the two have fought against one another as often as they’ve worked together. 2012’s Avengers Vs. X-Men event was probably the biggest, accompanied by a miniseries celebrating one-on-one scraps between team members.

Avengers: Doomsday features a sprawling cast, ranging from MCU stars to the original Fox heroes. More importantly, it’s expected to spin out of a comic book story that saw worlds collide, one perfectly designed for an adversarial narrative; there, multiversal incursions meant entire universes were being destroyed when different Earths collided, and the only way out was to destroy one of the alternate Earths. If the X-Men timeline is colliding with the MCU’s Earth-616, then only one universe can survive, and both superhero teams will be fighting for the sake of everything they know.

This narrative certainly explains why we’re getting Avengers vs. X-Men at last. The narrative is designed to give us a fight to the death, as mutants and metahumans collide in the ultimate versus match. Meanwhile, in the shadows, the threat of Doctor Doom looms over it all – a man powerful enough to catch Stormbreaker between his fingers, the greatest threat Thor believes he’s ever faced.

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