Yesterday, Marvel uploaded footage of some chairs to publicise Avengers: Doomsday. It ran for over five hours. We have some rather grumpy thoughts on the matter.
“Dostoyevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it,” the filmmaker Bruce Robinson wrote in his script for Withnail & I. “This room has several chairs.”
At around 3pm yesterday (26th March), Marvel began one of the weirdest pieces of film marketing this writer has seen in many years. To mark the beginning of Avengers: Doomsday’s production, the studio began to stream what was essentially an outsized teaser trailer.
You may have seen at least snippets of it by now: the scene opens on a dimly lit soundstage. In the foreground: a director’s chair with Chris Hemsworth’s name emblazoned on the back. The camera lingers on the chair for at least 12 agonising minutes before – get this – the view pans across to another chair. This one has Vanessa Kirby’s name on the back.
Even at this stage, anyone watching might have thought: they’re announcing the cast. Got it. But how long is this going to take? The answer was an agonising five hours, 27 minutes and 52 seconds. That’s a horrifyingly long time to reel off the names of 26 actors; as Film Stories head honcho Simon Brew pointed out this morning, it’s the ultimate example of the “this could have been an email” meme.
Marvel fans have, no doubt, lapped the casting news up with excitement: it’s genuinely surprising to see so many veterans of the 2000s X-Men movies making a reappearance (including Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler) alongside characters from earlier Marvels movies and future ones (including this spring’s Thunderbolts*).
And as the company’s marketers no doubt predicted, comic book movie-leaning websites and YouTube channels are filling up with dissections of what the names announced might mean – and speculation over why some actors are conspicuously absent.
All that aside, it takes a certain level of hubris – bordering on arrogance – to spend over five hours beaming out images of chairs. Bear in mind that, when the stream went out, nobody had any idea as to how long it would last or what would happen next. It could have been that the art installation-like footage of seats could have been interrupted by a massive explosion and a new trailer (showing actual movie footage rather than collapsible furniture) or something like that.
As a result, there were likely hundreds of entertainment journalists across the globe – whose jobs depend on keeping up with these sorts of announcements – glued to the screen, bored out of their minds but having to pay attention all the same. As World Of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy wrote as the stream unfolded yesterday, “It’s been three hours since this thing started, and there’s no end in sight. Cast members are still being announced. This is the stuff of nightmares.”
Little did Mr Ruimy know that there were still about 150 minutes of tedium still to go. If we were to convert that into units, that’s one whole Thor: The Dark World.
Given that Marvel’s been on uneven ground with its film output of late, you’d think it might want to tread a bit more carefully with its audience. Keeping its fans (and potential customers) sitting around for hours on end was the sort of thing it could get away with more easily when it was producing acclaimed box office smashes like The Avengers or Black Panther. Less so when it’s putting out such misshapen items as Captain America: Brave New World or Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania.
Then again, maybe the announcement was a bit of passive-aggressive revenge directed at the entertainment journalism sector as a whole. You gave Quantumania two stars? This is for you. You thought Eternals was dull? Sit through this, you talentless hack. And as for the rest of you: we know you’ll report on this anyway, because this is Marvel, this is Avengers – one of the biggest brands in 21st century popular culture, and if you don’t have stories about it on your site quickly enough, then your competitors will get the traffic instead. Get typing, suckers, or you get the hose again.
This dark joke at everyone’s expense even has a punchline. Not long after the livestream ended, Marvel uploaded a second video to its YouTube channel, titled ‘Avengers: Doomsday | Now in Production’. It has the exact same set-up: the same chairs all in a row, the same cute little gag about Paul Rudd’s seat being smaller than everyone else’s, and even Robert Downey Jr sitting at the end, his eyebrow raised in an “I’m getting $100m for this gig” sort of way. And do you know how long this video is?
One minute and 47 seconds.
Well played, Marvel. Well played.
Avengers: Doomsday is due for release on the 1st May 2026.
