We Know When the First ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ Trailer Will Arrive [Exclusive]

While Avengers: Doomsday may not be in theaters until December 2026, it sounds like fans won’t have to wait too much longer to see a tease of the movie. Collider has learned from multiple sources that the first footage from the MCU’s next big team-up film is scheduled to be attached to the latest installment of one of Disney’s other blockbuster franchises, Avatar: Fire and Ash. While that decision could change over the next month, if it holds, theatergoers will get their first proper look at Robert Downey Jr.‘s titanium-masked supervillain as soon as December 19. The timing would be fitting, considering James Cameron‘s third adventure to Pandora is releasing almost exactly one year before Doomsday’s arrival on December 18, 2026.

With Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps finally premiering this year, the stage is mostly set for Doomsday to begin. Earlier this year, Marvel grabbed everyone’s attention all over again when they revealed chairs for the cast of the blockbuster event, which contained a fair few surprises, like the return of many of the 20th Century Fox X-Men. Still, the team has been as secretive as ever about the details of the crossover, even to the stars. Alan Cumming, who’s set to reprise his role as Nightcrawler, revealed he began filming before the script was finished. David Harbour, Florence Pugh, and Kelsey Grammer, too, confessed they hadn’t laid eyes on the finished script when starting the project. It’s a similar approach to that of Anthony and Joe Russo‘s last Avengers movies, Infinity War and Endgame, and, fittingly, this adventure is set to be of a similar scale.

The Russo Brothers reunited with a familiar collaborator in writer Stephen McFeely for the script, though Christopher Markus, who previously joined the trio for their past MCU efforts and films like The Grey Man and The Electric State, is not returning as he’s currently focused on a backlog of projects. His absence hasn’t necessarily slowed down their work on the ambitious film, though. Between other X-Men favorites like Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, and Rebecca Romijn, returning Infinity Saga stars Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston, newer additions to the franchise like Pedro Pascal and Venessa Kirby, and the $100 million man himself, Downey Jr., as the big villain, among others, Doomsday will be uniting multiple eras of Marvel under one multiversal roof and leading to a somehow even more radical story in Avengers: Secret Wars. That’s without considering the inevitable surprises bound to appear throughout the likely two-and-a-half-hour runtime.

Simu Liu recently described the feeling of returning for such an affair to Collider’s Steve Weintraub, saying it reminded him of why he loved superhero movie-making in the first place.

“It’s pretty much what you think. I don’t want to put words out that will be turned into their own sound bites, but I think it was just an incredibly exciting feeling to know that you were coming back and then also to get to work with so many incredible people whose body of work I either grew up watching or I greatly, greatly admire. Getting to see them all put on tights and spandex and to play in this beautiful sandbox felt like a love letter to superhero movies in general.”

‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ Is Set to Be Disney’s Next Big Blockbuster

Premiering Doomsday footage during screenings of Avatar would be a bit of a role reversal, after viewers first caught the Fire and Ash trailer before The Fantastic Four in theaters. The threequel returns to Pandora in the direct aftermath of 2022’s The Way of Water, as Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his family are pitted against the Ash People, a group of Na’vi determined to burn the lush planet to ash after feeling abandoned by Eywa. Even worse, Jake’s nemesis, Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), has allied with them, offering his firepower to their cause. This new conflict threatens to engulf all of Pandora, and Jake and his people will need all the help they can get from nature and beyond to prevent a calamity. After The Way of Water scored a staggering $2.34 billion at the global box office, Disney is undoubtedly hoping another round of visual spectacles will earn a similar haul.

Avatar: Fire and Ash premieres on December 19, while Avengers: Doomsday will follow a year later on December 18, 2026. Stay tuned here at Collider for more as the march towards the next Avengers continues.

Release Date

December 18, 2026

Writers

Stephen McFeely, Michael Waldron, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee