With Avengers: Doomsday set to arrive in 2026, Marvel Studios is quickly running out of time to actually build the Avengers. The teasers released already suggest the original Avengers of the Multiverse Saga will play a significant part, with Steve Rogers and Thor heavily pushed, but that wasn’t what we were led to believe a matter of months ago. We were told, in Captain America: Brave New World that this would be the first post-Endgame attempt to rebuild the Avengers, and that it would be around Sam Wilson’s Captain America. Obviously, Thunderbolts* then threw an almighty spanner in the works, but even there, Sam’s team was presented as the “main Avengers”, and Bucky’s the “New Avengers.”
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Now that Cap and Thor are back, and with Mark Ruffalo, Tom Holland, and Jeremy Renner all expected to be back too, the question of who will actually make up Sam’s Avengers is still unclear. Logically, you’d expect him to recruit the best available heroes, given the coming threat to Earth, but the connective tissue to allow that simply doesn’t exist, and there’s no time to add it. Take Riri Williams, for instance, the perfect candidate to bring near-unrivalled technological genius to the Avengers, who is already on the radar of the Wakandans, and who absolutely wouldn’t be sitting out the fight with Doom. But thanks to the ending of Ironheart, it feels impossible for her to even be mentioned, let alone return.
Ironheart Created A Huge Devil-Shaped Problem For Doomsday
On paper, Riri is an obvious recruit: she’s young, brilliant, and is still the most likely candidate to inherit Tony Stark’s legacy in a way that fits Marvel’s next-generation narrative now that Spider-Man’s story is headed in another direction. But there’s a massive, devil-shaped problem: Riri Williams is no longer just Ironheart. She’s now under the corrupting influence of Mephisto, following the supernatural revelations at the end of her 2025 show. Because that is simply not a story point that can be casually brushed aside without cheapening it or making everything confusing.
So how does Marvel intend to juggle that? The short answer is it can’t. Avengers: Doomsday already looked dangerously overstuffed before we knew Steve Rogers was back, and if it’s under 3 hours, it will be extremely shocking. Between Sam Wilson leading the Avengers for the first time, the arrival of the Fantastic Four, a potential Thunderbolts standoff, Cap’s return, Doom’s rise, and the ongoing multiverse crisis that will bring in the X-Men, there is simply no room for a subplot for Riri. Ironheart’s corruption arc needs more space to develop than Doomsday can shoehorn in between fan-service battles.
The options here are either to bring Riri back and ignore the demonic possession entirely (which feels impossible, but might also have to be done for James Rhodes’ Secret Invasion reveal if he’s also involved), or just not bring Riri back at all. The latter feels likely now, but will go down as yet another case of the post-Endgame story development being completely cast aside for the culminating event that should surely have tied it all together. Unfortunately, that’s the situation Marvel has created, and while Ironheart wasn’t to everyone’s taste, the fact that the next major MCU crossover will simply have to ignore the arrival of a villain as potent as Mephisto, and a character now as powerful as Ironheart, is ludicrous.
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