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 like AI. 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. 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. If you ever needed proof of how most of the internet is just people in a room being needlessly reactionary for clicks, and shouting onto their own wall and calling the echo a majority, this counts as one.
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 checkpoint, 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 and if it holds this pace, $80 million-plus in previews is genuinely on the table. Triple digits. 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.
Here’s what makes that number almost impossible to sanity-check: with Brand New Day, there was at least a comparison set, The Force Awakens, Endgame, No Way Home, films that had walked this exact road before. Doomsday doesn’t have that luxury. 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. How far past that line it goes is genuinely unknowable right now.
For context, worth laying the previous MCU tentpoles side by side at their opening days for presales:
- 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 that surge 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 is no such thing as Dunesday, Doomsday’s projected Thursday preview number alone is already tracking to outgross Dune 3’s entire opening weekend. Whatever chess Disney and Warner Bros. thought they were playing with that release date, one side just showed up with considerably more pieces on the board.
Source: Box Office Theory.