While it seems like the Marvel Cinematic Universe is heading into Avengers: Doomsday without any setup, that isn’t true. Doctor Doom hasn’t shown up yet, other than a post-credits scene in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but Marvel has gone a long way in setting up this story, and it goes back several years. This movie isn’t about setting up Doctor Doom as a villain. It is about paying off the Multiverse Saga and the story winding through those movies.
The movie will loosely follow the “Time Runs Out” storyline from Marvel Comics. That storyline had a lot of things that didn’t happen in the MCU, including the Illuminati and the Ultimate Universe fighting for its survival against Earth-616. There are several ways that the MCU will mirror those events, including replacing the Ultimate Universe with the X-Men’s world, but in the end, Earth will die, and Battleworld will be born.
This is all about the incursions, and while Doctor Doom seemed to arrive with no buildup, the incursions have been building for several years now, and it all honestly started with Avengers: Endgame, which should be revealed in that movie’s re-release this year. That has now spread through stories in movies and on Disney+ shows, and the road to Avengers: Doomsday has been clear.
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Sylvie Destroying The Sacred Timeline
It is fair to say that Wanda Maximoff destroyed more than one world with an incursion that she started when she kept leaping from Earth to Earth trying to find her children. When she slaughtered the Illuminati in one world, she surely doomed that planet, and she didn’t care. However, it wasn’t Wanda who did the most damage. It was Sylvie in the Loki Disney+ series. Wanda disrupted timelines, while Sylvie destroyed the Sacred Timeline.
Sylvie believed her life was ruined by the Time Variance Authority, so she wanted to burn everything down. She stole reset charges from the TVA and set them up at different historical points across the Sacred Timeline. She then killed He Who Remains (a Kang variant) at the end of the first season, and this shattered the Sacred Timeline, which caused the multi-timeline chaos that led to the incursions.
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Loki Taking Control At The End Of Time
Loki is almost surely going to be the key to the entire Avengers: Doomsday reveal and the setup to Avengers: Secret Wars. That is because the second season of Loki on Disney+ saw him give up everything, sacrificing his freedom to sit on the throne at the End of Time to serve as its living power source. This came after he destroyed the Temporal Loom and saved the multiverse, at least for now.
Loki, using his magic, wove the dying branches of the timelines together and turned them into a multiverse shaped like the Norse world tree Yggdrasil. With Sylvie killing He Who Remains, it was up to Loki to save the world. There are rumors that Doctor Doom will come for Loki in an attempt to complete his mission of saving the world by creating Battleworld, and Loki’s new powers will likely play into that plan.
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Spider-Man Almost Breaking The Multiverse
The moments from Loki played out in both Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man: No Way Home. Both of those movies had moments that further fractured the multiverse. In the Doctor Strange movie, the Illuminati revealed that the incursions would destroy Earths where people crossed over into a world that wasn’t their own and damaged that timeline. Wanda did this several times.
Spider-Man did it in a way that put the actual Earth-616 in danger. Wanda destroyed entire Earths by damaging their timelines. Spider-Man, however, brought heroes and villains from two different Earths to Earth-616, and this did to his world what Wanda did to the other Earths. When Spider-Man brought these characters to his world, he ensured that the incursions would be coming for the MCU.
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The Time Heist In Avengers: Endgame
Marvel is re-releasing Avengers: Endgame in 2026 before Avengers: Doomsday, and there will be some new scenes added to the movie that will tie into the Doomsday story. There are heavy rumors that Doctor Doom has an intense hatred for Steve Rogers, blaming Rogers for the destruction of his own timeline and the death of his family. This is supposed to be because of the Time Heist, and Rogers attempted to replace everything.
Rogers chose not to return and lived out his life with Peggy Carter, showing himself as an older man at the end of Avengers: Endgame, passing on his shield to Sam Wilson. The Avengers going back in time to find a way to beat Thanos and fix Earth caused a lot of bad things to happen to the timeline, and even with Rogers supposedly replacing them to keep this from happening, it looks like he failed. If this is true, the Time Heist both saved the Earth and destroyed it.
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The Fantastic Four Heading To Earth-616
Of course, the biggest and last moment that leads into Avengers: Doomsday involves The Fantastic Four, both in The Fantastic Four: First Steps and the post-credits scene from Thunderbolts*. First off, The Fantastic Four movie saw the introduction of Doctor Doom into the MCU for the first time. This is a small scene with Doom sitting with Franklin Richards when Sue Storm walks in, but it is his official introduction.
However, the biggest moment came at the end of Thunderbolts*, when they saw an incoming spacecraft, and when it turned, it had The Fantastic Four’s logo on it. This is what started the idea of the incursions: The Fantastic Four coming to Earth-616 to try to find help, and the hint that the X-Men were also coming. The idea of there being no setup for Avengers: Doomsday comes from these two moments, but they were only the last steps of a story that has been building for years now.
- Release Date
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December 18, 2026
- Runtime
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165 Minutes
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Vanessa Kirby
Sue Storm / Invisible Woman
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Johnny Storm / Human Torch
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Ebon Moss-Bachrach
Ben Grimm / The Thing
