Marvel Studios Plays Hours Long Musical Chairs, Announcing Avengers Doomsday Cast

Wednesday, Marvel took and inordinate amount of time to generate buzz and hype around not the next big MCU film (Thunderbolts*) or even around the one after that (Fantastic Four: First Steps). Instead, they spent over five and a half hours teasing information for 2026’s MCU epic event Avengers: Doomsday by presenting to the world…chairs on all of their social media platforms.

I will freely admit, dear reader, that these were no ordinary chairs, and they were not in an ordinary location. At the beginning of this “live” (and I use the term loosely) event a sound stage door opened in the distance, a contrasting white light in a room of darkness, from which an unidentifiable figure brought forth a folding set chair. This chair had a printed chair back containing the name of our first forthcoming Avenger, Chris Hemsworth.

What followed in the subsequent approximate 20,040 seconds was a slow roll-out of more chairs randomly placed anywhere between 7 and 15 minutes. Each chair presented a new name in-between a monotonous sound and then immediately preceded by a piece of movie score related to the character that the actor plays.

I will give Marvel Studios credit for this unconventional method for announcing the cast of the Avengers: Doomsday, especially given that the film is now in production. The entire run was similar to eras past when radio stations would use monotone sounds with interspersed sound bites as stunting for when a format change was forthcoming. In this digital age is was also a great approach because it was something that could safely be streamed in the background while you were sitting at your desk trying to get work done, which was very handy since the beginning of the stream also kicked off in the middle of the day for people on the East Coast and beginning of the workday for the West Coast. I will say, however, that the amount of time between each reveal felt somewhat extreme given that people in the eastern part of the United States that aren’t fortunate enough to be working from home would be in the midst of their commute as some of the biggest names were revealed.

If you don’t want to watch the entire stream, here are the highlights of the “big moments” of the stream:
– Paul Rudd returning as Ant Man was represented perfectly by panning down from the chair announcing Letitia Wright to reveal a miniaturized set chair.
– A large number of OG X-Men will be appearing in this movie including Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Rebecca Romjin, Alan Cumming, James Marsden, and newly minted X-man Channing Tatum appears set to return as Gambit (although after last summer’s blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine there is a notable absence of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman).
– The stream wraps with the sound of an alarm bell, typically used to announce that shooting is about to start, and the same large door re-opened and Robert Downer Jr. walked the entire line of chairs to sit for a moment in his.

Was all of this worth the watch? Probably not. Will it work to generate some press and hype? I’m writing about it aren’t I?

Here’s the abridged video of the announcement on Marvel Entertainment’s YouTube below. If you’d like to experience the event yourself or perhaps need something to lull you into a five hour nap, follow the link here.

If you’d like to spare yourself the pain, here’s the entire list of the cast as announced on the stream:
Chris Hemsworth – Thor
Vanessa Kirby – Invisible Woman
Anthony Mackie – Captain America
Sebastian Stan – Bucky
Letitia Wright – Black Panther
Paul Rudd – Ant-Man
Wyatt Russell – U.S. Agent
Tenoch Huerta Mejia – Namor
Ebon Moss-Bachrach – The Thing
Simu Liu – Shang-Chi
Florence Pugh – Yelena Belova
Kelsey Grammer – Beast
Lewis Pullman – The Sentry?
Danny Ramirez – The Falcon
Joseph Quinn – Human Torch
David Harbour – Red Guardian
Winston Duke – M’Baku
Hannah John-Kamen – Ghost
Tom Hiddleston – Loki
Patrick Stewart – Professor X
Ian McKellen – Magneto
Alan Cumming – Nightcrawler
Rebecca Romijn – Mystique
James Marsden – Cyclops
Channing Tatum – Gambit
Pedro Pascal – Mister Fantastic
Robert Downey Jr. – Doctor Doom

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Will Wilkins

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