Chris Evans is officially returning to the MCU in Avengers: Doomsday, reprising his role as Steve Rogers what will be, by then, seven and a half years after his “final” appearance. Whether you’ve seen the Avengers: Doomsday trailer with Steve’s return or not, the news has made it’s away around. Naturally, there are a lot of questions surrounding both the actor and character coming back, not least because it turns out he (and presumably Peggy Carter) now have a child.
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The move is, for me, simultaneously smart, desperate, and above all, inevitable. Bringing back Evans, after already bringing back Robert Downey Jr. (albeit now as Doctor Doom rather than Iron Man) is a blatant attempt at winning fans back and generating hype for Doomsday, which is a movie that Marvel really needs to be a major hit, as the MCU’s veneer of invincibility has been destroyed in recent years.
Marvel knows the power of nostalgia better than most – just look at the box office success of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Deadpool & Wolverine (not for nothing, the three biggest movies across Phases 4-6 so far). Evans as Rogers is part of that, but I’d much rather it wasn’t happening.
Avengers: Doomsday Bringing Back Steve Rogers Undoes His Perfect Endgame
My frustration with Steve’s return is nothing to do with disliking the character or Evans’ performance, but quite the opposite. I loved Steve’s arc from a more naive, blindly loyal soldier to someone who questioned everything around him, made some of the hardest choices he’d ever faced, and yet never stopped being a hero.
The key with Evans’ Captain America is that he was always a guy who would’ve made the sacrifice play if needed, so it was the most fitting fate for him that he didn’t have to. Instead, after so long being a man out of time, he got the perfect ending, getting to go back to where he always belonged, with the person he belonged with.
It’s in that blissful existence we’ll seemingly find him when Avengers: Doomsday begins, and that means it has to, at least temporarily, be broken. Rather than the quiet, happy life he deserves, he is going to be forced back into the fray, his new life disrupted by his old one coming back to haunt him. One popular theory even suggests that Doom attacks because Steve staying into the past caused an incursion that destroyed his planet and killed his own family, which turns his Endgame choice into a decision that sparks multiversal disaster.
Maybe they can turn that into a compelling story, but I really wish it didn’t have to. I can remember going into Endgame expecting and hoping that Steve’s fate would be with Peggy, rather than death, and was delighted that’s what happened. That movie had plenty moments of fan service, but that felt truly earned, and was the perfect payoff and conclusion to his entire story.
It’s quite possible his return will end with the same status quo, but I’d much rather never see Steve again, because it’s hard to imagine a story good enough that justifies his return, nor an ending that delivers the same level of satisfaction. Steve Rogers can do this all day, sure, but he shouldn’t have to.
Chris Evans’ Return Is An Admission Of Marvel’s Failure
Like with Downey Jr., bringing Evans back to the fold is an admission from Marvel that it f**ked up with the Multiverse Saga. It’s having to go back to the old guard – as well as these two, it’s expected that another of Avengers: Doomsday‘s trailers will focus on Chris Hemsworth’s Thor – because it has failed to make audiences care enough about new characters.
There are some variables in there that were, to be fair, beyond Marvel’s control: a pandemic that forcibly changed moviegoing habits, strikes that delayed productions. But there’s also a lot that it got wrong. It pushed far too hard, far too fast into streaming, going from 0-100 before realizing to needed to stomp on the brakes.
With that came a lack of oversight, with Kevin Feige stretched too thin, and a loss of quality control across movies and TV: there have always been some MCU movies weaker than others, but putting out mediocre fare like Eternals, Doctor Strange 2, Thor: Love and Thunder, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Captain America: Brave New World within just a few years absolutely hurts the brand. That’s particularly the case when it was accompanied by so much streaming content, some of which also ranks among the MCU’s worst projects (e.g. Secret Invasion).
It has not all been bad, not even close to it. But Marvel has failed to capitalize on the brightspots. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings wasn’t just a good movie, but Simu Liu’s character is one of the best heroes Marvel has introduced post-Endgame, and… he hasn’t appeared in a movie since 2021. Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop is another great example, having shone in Hawkeye (one of the best MCU Disney+ shows), and yet only making one cameo since, which just so happened to be in the MCU’s biggest box office bomb, The Marvels.
With this lack of quality, and failure to invest in its new heroes and make new phases that felt cohesive – so much of Phases 4 and 5 feels randomly selected – while simultaneously putting out so much content, it’s also led to a certain amount of fatigue. Things started to turn a corner, quality-wise, in 2025, with things like Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but the box office wasn’t where Marvel would like. And so where has that led them? Back to Evans, back to Downey Jr, and, hell, it wouldn’t be a shock if it was back to Thanos as well.
I Know I’ll Be Seeing Avengers: Doomsday Regardless
Herein lies the problem with my own annoyance and complaining: it isn’t going to stop me from seeing the movie. This is an Avengers film, and having followed the MCU from the very beginning, I’ll be seated for Doomsday on day one. That would be true regardless of which characters were or weren’t returning, and I’d certainly have far more excitement if I thought this was a movie that would really put the onus on the new generation. I want to see more Shang-Chi, more Kate, more of Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, more of Iman Vellani’s Ms. Marvel.
I had nearly a decade of Evans, across three Captain America movies and four Avengers films. I don’t need more. I saw Downey Jr. be the biggest face in the MCU for 11 years, I don’t need him back. And yet… there I’ll be. Their return isn’t designed “for me,” it’s for the people who have waned, who maybe aren’t guaranteed to go see the latest Avengers movie, who’ve tuned out of the MCU since Endgame. And in the moment, there’ll probably be a part of me that does feel something seeing him on-screen again, even if it’s a cheap nostalgia play.
I really hope it delivers. That my concerns are for nought, that Steve’s storyline is brilliant and emotional, that Downey Jr gives us a Marvel villain performance for the ages, and that Doomsday can live up to the standard of Infinity War and Endgame, but the nature of them returning, the context and backdrop to it, makes it very hard to have that faith. I think it’ll undoubtedly work at the box office, where the very baseline for this should be $1.5 billion and go from there, but will it be good? Will it justify those returns? That’s so much harder to pull off but, rant over, I guess I can but hope, which is maybe what Steve would do too.
Avengers: Doomsday will be released in theaters on December 18th, 2026.
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