On the social media website known as Twitter, or X, or whatever people are calling it this week, there have been many complaints about Avengers: Doomsday. A lot of people are calling it nostalgia bait, while some are comparing the film to something that looks AI-generated. Joe Russo’s stance on generative AI certainly doesn’t help. But what happened to judging the movie instead of the trailer?
I do wholeheartedly think some of the complaints are justified. As big a cinematic event as this film is, it still very much looks like a film shot entirely on a soundstage, unlike Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But to go as far as claiming that this film will be a flop, that people will choose “the cinematic art” that is Dune 3 over it, and that nobody cares about an Avengers film anymore? That has always seemed like a bit of a stretch.
Four months out, and Doomsday is already doing things no Marvel film, nay, no film, has done at this stage of a release cycle. At the first major tracking checkpoint, nine days before that checkpoint would typically fall relative to release, it’s already matched Deadpool & Wolverine’s preview numbers at the same point in its own cycle, and the overall weekend tracking sits roughly in line with where Deadpool & Wolverine stood six days ahead of its own opening day, a film that went on to post the biggest R-rated opening of all time.
At a third tracking checkpoint, taken on the release date itself, Doomsday has already sold 92% of Fantastic Four: First Steps’ entire preview haul. If the film were to hold this pace, $80 million-plus in previews is not only likely, but triple-digit figures are in play as well.
A hundred million dollars in previews alone, which would make it the first film in history to get there. Extrapolated out, that’s a potential $400 million opening weekend, assuming capacity doesn’t become the ceiling first.
With Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the current holder of the record for the Highest-Domestic Opening Weekend, there was at least a comparison set: The Force Awakens, Endgame, and No Way Home, films that had walked this exact road before. Doomsday doesn’t feel like something that we have seen before. The last Avengers film was seven years ago. This is uncharted water, four months from release, and the only honest guess is that it’s heading toward the biggest domestic opening weekend of all time.
For context, it’s worth laying the previous MCU tentpoles side by side at their opening days for pre-sales:
- Endgame: $45 million at T-24
- No Way Home: $36 million at T-17
- Brand New Day: $20–22 million at T-44
- Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: $17 million at T-30
- Deadpool & Wolverine: $8.5 million at T-67
Doomsday is running 67% ahead of Brand New Day on its second tracking day, at T-124 versus Brand New Day’s T-43, which is a genuinely absurd gap to be posting this early. Some of this massive boost in pre-sales that Doomsday has gotten traces directly back to the D23 special look, which appears to have shoved the hype straight past Latveria and back out the other side.
At this rate, there might not be such a thing as Dunesday. The previous Dune film grossed $82 million in its opening weekend, with no box-office competition. Doomsday’s projected Thursday preview number alone is already tracking to outgross Dune 3’s entire opening weekend.
Of course, this movie is not entirely infallible; its legs will probably still be determined by reviews and the word of mouth surrounding it. Society certainly has, in 2026, moved past the aesthetic sensibilities of the prime MCU movies, but then again, it is the Avengers we are talking about. There has never been a bad Avengers film.
Even Age of Ultron did a billion dollars in 2015, and much like Spider-Man, this brand, as well as the stars it has (Robert Downey Jr.) and the stars it has made (Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, etc.), are a huge global commodity. You need the international box office in your favor to have a run that could justify the cost of a movie that is almost $500 million. But if Michael can go deep, the first Avengers film this decade, which also features the X-Men, probably would, too.
Source: Box Office Theory.