This year’s Avengers: Doomsday promises to give us live-action Sentinels at last, and they could easily wipe out the Avengers. Created to hunt down mutants, the Sentinels have become one of the X-Men’s greatest enemies. Avengers: Doomsday‘s X-Men trailer confirmed we’re about to see comic-book-accurate Sentinels at last, because Cyclops is shown battling against unseen threats while Sentinels loom in the background. The general assumption is that Sentinels have attacked Xavier’s mansion, and the X-Men are dying in battle against them.
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But Doomsday is more than just a mutant story. At least three universes are in play; the X-Men timeline (likely visited by Monica Rambeau at the end of The Marvels), the mainstream MCU, and the Fantastic Four’s timeline. Given that’s the case, it’s quite possible villains as well as heroes are about to cross the dimensions. So how powerful would the Sentinels be if they attacked the MCU’s surviving Avengers?
Just How Powerful Are the Sentinels?
Assuming Doomsday‘s Sentinels are comic-book accurate, there’s one frustrating question: Which comics are they accurate to? The Sentinels were deliberately created to eliminate mutants, which means they were designed with remarkable powers of adaptation. There’s a sense in which the Sentinels evolve, with each generation becoming more powerful than the last; it means no two waves of Sentinels can ever be defeated in the same way. Mark II Sentinels successfully captured nearly every known mutant at the time, innovating technology to counter Omega mutants like Magneto.
X-Men comics often explore future timelines, and those reveal just how powerful the Sentinels can really evolve to be. In the Days of Future Past timeline, Sentinels successfully conquered the entire world, killing most of the planet’s superheroes and imprisoning mutants. The most dangerous Sentinels of all, the Nimrod models, are so powerful that even the X-Men have never successfully defeated the main Nimrod; when one arrived in the present, the X-Men had to use time travel and sorcery to deal with it. Professor X, Magneto, and Moira MacTaggert considered the mere emergence of a single Nimrod to be an extinction-level event for the entire mutant race.
Could the Sentinels Handle the Avengers as Well as the X-Men?
Sentinels are essentially hunter-killers, and they’ve been responsible for more mutant deaths than any other threat; X-Men ’97 Season 1 adapted the iconic (horrific) storyline in which wild Sentinels committed genocide on the mutant nation of Genosha, one of the biggest disasters in Marvel history. They may focus on mutants, but the Sentinels have gone up against other heroes many times. Street-level superheroes seldom have a chance against them, with the Sentinels effortlessly adapting to Hawkeye’s arrows, but they even managed to create force-fields that protected them from Thor’s hammer. Vision’s intangibility was countered using resonant frequencies.
It’s true there is an upper limit to even a Sentinel’s adaptability. During the “Onslaught” event, the X-Men, Avengers, and Spider-Man took on an army of reprogrammed Sentinels, and treated them as little more than cannon fodder. But it’s important to note these Sentinels were unfinished, prematurely activated by Onslaught simply to keep the heroes busy. True Sentinels should be much harder to defeat, and as capable of handling Avengers as they are X-Men.
In the Days of Future Past timeline, the Sentinels evolved countermeasures allowing them to kill Avengers as well as X-Men. These Sentinels are known to have successfully slaughtered Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Daredevil, and even the Hulk. We never really saw exactly how the Sentinels adapted to such diverse powersets, but it’s likely their advanced sensors gave them an edge; they’d be able to strike even if heroes were in their civilian identities. They probably defeated powerhouses like Thor and the Hulk simply through attrition, because Sentinels can be constructed quickly and efficiently, meaning there’s no limit to their numbers.
What Will the MCU’s Sentinels Be Able to Do?
All this means it’s very difficult indeed to tell what would happen should Sentinels go up against the MCU’s Avengers. Lower-power heroes like Black Widow and Hawkeye would be defeated with ease, while specific countermeasures could be deployed against Vision. Powerhouses like Thor and the Hulk would be the real test for the Sentinels, but it’s worth noting neither of these MCU superheroes is quite as powerful as their comic book counterpart. If Sentinels could beat the Hulk and Thor in the comics, they could certainly do so in the MCU.
Ironically, the Sentinels and the Avengers would both face the same challenge: adaptation. The Avengers have never fought anything like the Sentinels before (Ultron’s drones being a poor point of comparison). Meanwhile, the Sentinels would need to adapt countermeasures to specific powersets they had never encountered before. The outcome would likely depend on which side adapted first, and there the Sentinels – with their vast processing power – have a marked advantage. If the Sentinels attack in force, it could easily be the end of the Avengers.
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