Chair-to-Chair: Marvel's Show of Cultural Force Reinforces Creative Challenges

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As I start writing this, it’s been over five hours since Marvel started streaming a video of an empty soundstage on social platforms. On Twitter it was shared as “An Announcement,” alongside the text “Take a seat,” while on YouTube they called it what it really was: “Avengers: Doomsday | Cast Announce.”

The video—calling it a livestream is misleading, it was clearly prerecorded and edited together—begins with a blurred figure entering and placing a director’s chair with Chris Hemsworth’s name on it. Then, every fifteen minutes, a music cue signaled the placement of an additional chair. All told, 27 chairs were placed until finally 5 ½ hours later—as I began writing—the blurry figure returned to reveal that it was Robert Downey Jr., previously confirmed to be returning to the MCU in the role of Doctor Doom.

My journalist friends immediately flashed back to HBO’s infamous stunt where they melted a block of ice with the date of the Game of Thrones premiere trapped inside, and this does on its face seem similarly absurd given that it took Marvel over five hours to effectively provide a list of names. But the difference here is that the end result here wasn’t just a piece of information: with each new name, fans and followers were shifting their understanding of what this latest team-up film says about the state of the MCU. The speculation got to keep evolving with each new chair, to the point that concluding on Pedro Pascal—the one remaining member of the Fantastic Four, and thus an inevitability—seemed like a strange anti-climax (yes, Downey Jr. was technically last, but we already knew about him).

Mind you, we could have presumed most of these names would be involved with the film: for instance, given that Captain America: Brave New World ends with Sam Wilson agreeing to reform the Avengers, no one was shocked when Anthony Mackie’s chair came into the frame. And while perhaps Thor wasn’t a given, he and Ant-Man were the last two Avengers to get their own standalone films, and thus likely participants in a teamup. Similarly, once one of the Thunderbolts appeared, it seemed logical to assume that the rest would follow (and follow they did, to the point where one livestreamer I watched for a bit pleaded “I don’t know how many more Thunderbolts I can take”). For a lengthy stretch early on, the exercise felt particularly silly: waiting fifteen minutes to confirm that Wyatt Russell and Lewis Pullman would be in the movie doesn’t exactly ignite the online discourse, y’know?

Still, though, the nature of the MCU is that followers of the sprawling franchise can make a meal out of anything, especially in a context where the state of things feels so uncertain. The last five years of Marvel projects have dramatically expanded the scale of the stories being told, but at the expense of clarity over which of those narratives are most likely to converge in moments like this one. The whole premise of Infinity War and Endgame was that they would be the culmination of every film in the franchise to date, but that premise no longer applies given the TV shows that spread Marvel too thin or the films that underperformed at the box office. It wasn’t shocking that there were no Eternals among the chairs, for example, and we were under no expectations that Oscar Isaac’s name was going to come up. But it felt notable that Simu Liu would be returning as Shang-Chi after his sequel film stalled in development (and after the first film’s director left this film to do Spider-Man instead), and that Letitia Wright’s Black Panther would be joined by both an ally (Winston Duke’s M’Baku) and a villain (Tenoch Huerta Mejia’s Namor) following Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. And given that Loki season two had seemingly closed the book on Tom Hiddleston’s time in the MCU, his appearance returned that series to the forefront of the conversation.

The chairs were also designed to play with our expectations. When Kelsey Grammer appeared first, it was as the one actor from Fox’s original X-Men films who had already appeared in the MCU at the end of The Marvels. At the time, that seemed to signal we would likely see the characters directly involved in that story—Teyonah Parris’ Spectrum and Lashana Lynch as Binary—on subsequent chairs. But it turns out that they were absent, and that Grammer’s presence was actually a precursor for a whole slew of X-Men actors plus a wannabe X-Man from Deadpool & Wolverine for good measure. That lit up the discourse quickly—the YouTube livestream was at around 105,000 before Patrick Stewart, and after Ian McKellen fifteen minutes later it was closer to 130,000. By the time Downey Jr. appeared, Doomsday had collected 150,000 devoted viewers and a cast that promised direct continuity from the two remaining MCU films this year—Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four—alongside a long-awaited clash between two iconic teams separated by ownership conflicts for two decades.

Even the skeptics were silenced into dashing off SEO-chasing breakdowns of the cast members by the time the stream concluded, and I’m sure those with knowledge of the comics were working to explain how the specific combination of characters could go together. In this way, Marvel’s approach here seems intended as a performance of the sheer scale of its pop culture footprint: sure, it might not be 27 A-List actors, but it’s still a degree of saturation that no other film could ever manage. It’s clear from Downey Jr.’s casting that Marvel is approaching this as an opportunity to signal a return to an era when Brave New World $400m worldwide would have been a crushing disappointment instead of a sigh of relief after The Marvels’ $200m, and ending the video with his appearance has big “He’s back, in POG form” energy.

However, I find myself wondering if this is actually what anyone wants. There’s no question that the Chair Video resonated with those of us who have made a lifelong commitment to watching every single one of these movies regardless of how milquetoast they might be (looking at you, Brave New World). But the bigger question is what exactly the people out there who bailed on the MCU after Endgame want in order to return for more than a one-off. Marvel is banking on “Robert Downey Jr.” and “X-Men Actors from Movies that my Students weren’t Alive For,” but in truth I’d speculate that what drew people into the MCU was that it didn’t seem like an overwhelming 5 ½ hour livestream kind of experience. It was movies you could drop into as you needed, culminating in a saga that featured a large cast of characters but centered on your emotional connection to the few who’d been there since the beginning. And the focus on “scale” here would seemingly work against that, as it just reminds people how many of these characters they’re supposed to care about they have no reference for.

But the hardest thing about this is that all I could focus on is what was missing. I’m not going to stand here and say that I need to see what was going to happen with Harry Styles on that spaceship, but the forgotten threads of the past few years of MCU films nonetheless accumulate interest that films like Doomsday are supposed to pay off. This is especially true for The Marvels, which in addition to Grammer’s appearance featured a closing tease of what seems like a significant thread from Phases 4 and 5: the Young Avengers, led by Hawkeye’s Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) and Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani). The recasting of Kathryn Newton as Cassie Lang in Quantumania was also mentioned in that tease, and America Chavez is presumably still off training with Doctor Strange. There’s also the summer premiere of Ironheart, first appearing in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, we can throw in Billy Maximoff from Agatha All Along, and if we want to get really crazy we can talk about Skaar—remember Skaar?

The point is, the Young Avengers have been a consistent and meaningful part of the buildup of Phases 4 and 5, and none of them are reflected here. It’s also important to note how many of these Young Avengers are women, and how few women are reflected in the 27-person cast of Doomsday: one X-Man, one Fantastic Four, two Thunderbolts, and a Black Panther. The Young Avengers felt like an opportunity for Marvel to find a new energy that might bring back lapsed viewers—or heck, even find new ones! To see it basically sidelined entirely in favor of a nostalgic trip seems regressive as hell, and a bad message to be carrying into what is meant to be a revitalized era.

Now, in between the two teamup films coming in 2026 and 2027, we’re getting another MCU film: the fourth Tom Holland Spider-Man installment. Holland is among the cast members conspicuously absent from this teamup, and it wouldn’t be insane to see some of the Young Avengers appearing in that film and then carrying over into Secret Wars. But the lack of certainty over what does or doesn’t matter is a condition of the current MCU that feels untenable to me, and we saw it play out here as content creators streamed the Chair Video live. I was watching one stream where the creator and their chat were both guessing the next name, and at one point both names were Young Avengers—none of those viewers engaged enough to be watching live were mad when things turned into X-Men instead, but it shows how it will matter how Marvel communicates with audiences that the characters and stories they’ve been asked to invest in will matter moving forward. That’s an uncertainty that didn’t exist back at the end of Phase 3, and one that I don’t think the Chair Video really reckoned with.

While the 2-minute version of the cast announcement is a far more efficient vehicle for the “headlines” of the day, it fails to reflect Marvel’s true intention. For five hours, they took over the internet, and reminded their most diehard fans—and beleaguered entertainment journalists—that they are capable of owning their time when they want to. This wasn’t ice melting: each chair has meaning, and the palpable excitement when the X-Men or Loki themes kicked in unexpectedly was a shared, collective moment for the chronically online that taps into that Hall H energy Marvel has leveraged so often over the years from the comfort of our homes. But I’m also not sure if it actually does anything to save the MCU from itself, which seems like it’s the underlying goal of every piece of Marvel content from now until…well, until the end, whatever that will mean.

Episodic Observations

• I truly barely have a full bullet point of thoughts on Brave New World: weird to think that the genre of a Captain America film would just stay the same with a change in the character carrying the mantle, Red Hulk being used as marketing while also being the film’s climax is deflating, and making it a sequel to The Incredible Hulk is rational without being useful in any way.
• My memo for the Chair Video: faster pace between chairs (10 minutes would have been fine), more gimmicks (I won’t spoil the one we get), put the groups together (leaving Pascal for last was weird).
• The music cues for the different actors were so interesting: obviously some of the characters have iconic themes (I recognized Ant-Man’s right away), but others don’t, and hearing what they chose for the X-Men was particularly interesting. Would love to hear more about the process, much as I’d like to hear more of Michael Giacchino’s Fantastic Four score.
• I’ll admit that while I was researching this, I discovered that this week’s Daredevil: Born Again might have actually had some Young Avengers content in it, but I haven’t gotten to that yet and won’t until probably later tonight. So go read Caroline’s reviews and we’ll have a conversation about it there.
• The unanswered question here is this: do we have any reason to believe this is everyone that is in the movie? It does seem like they’ve cut off any potential surprise, which seems to fly in the face of how we’re meant to anticipate these films. After Deadpool & Wolverine was so built around surprise cameos—including one that’s paying off in this movie—it feels weird to shift to purported certainty. Plus, is there no one new in the movie? Not a single new character? THR reports that there will be more people in the movie, but seems like this is the returning cast?