X-Men Star Reveals Why Avengers: Doomsday Will Be A Total Disaster

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago

Right now, hopes for Avengers: Doomsday are higher than ever. Marvel bigwigs like Kevin Feige and the Russos are hoping that this film can overcome the dreaded superhero fatigue, excite the public, and transform the MCU back into a money-printing machine. After enduring years of duds like Eternals and Captain America: Brave New World, fans are just hoping to see something as cool as Endgame. Despite the collective hype, though, Doomsday is still a huge gamble, and if it fails, it may very well take the entire cinematic universe with it.

Unfortunately, there have been some powerful hints that Doomsday might spell doom for the MCU. For example, Nightcrawler actor Alan Cumming recently gave an interview to Deadline in which he talked about his experiences working on both X2: X-Men United and Avengers: Doomsday. While he tried to keep things positive about the upcoming Marvel blockbuster, he did say something a bit alarming. According to him, Doomsday is so confusingly chock full of different characters that the film feels like “superhero soup.”

Welcome, Crawler!

While plenty of normies know him from the excellent Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, Alan Cumming first landed on geeks’ radar when he portrayed Nightcrawler in X2: X-Men United, one of the best superhero sequels ever made. Fans loved that film, but the actor apparently had a terrible time making it. Cumming cryptically told Deadline that “There were things that happened on the [X2] set that were just shocking to me” and that “The working environment was very, very wrong and very just unacceptable.” Comparatively, he found working on Avengers: Doomsday to be much more pleasant in almost every way.

However, the actor did have a few blunt notes about Marvel’s upcoming blockbuster. While he was happy to go back to playing Nightcrawler “because I really liked the character,” he declared that Avengers: Doomsday “is like superhero soup. There’s so many of them in it. I just can’t keep up.” He noted that reading the script was particularly difficult because “everyone’s got two names.” On top of that, “there were secret names in it because they didn’t want to let out that a certain character was coming back,” and they used different names in the script. Cumming ultimately wrapped his thoughts by saying, “It was so confusing.”

Is Marvel Doomed?

I’m as hyped for Avengers: Doomsday as the next nerd with an embarrassing amount of Marvel action figures and comic books. However, Alan Cumming’s interview has me very nervous about this upcoming blockbuster. I keep coming back to a simple thought: if the guy actually making this movie can’t keep track of the characters or plot, what chance do the rest of us have? Even if the plot of the movie is perfectly clear (which, given its crunchy connection to the Multiverse, is deeply unlikely), we’ll still be left with a big bowl of “superhero soup.” 

That is, the film may very well be juggling far too many characters to do all of them justice, and we may be getting a bunch of crowd-pleasing cameos at the expense of telling a good story. Plus, Marvel is gambling almost everything on the idea that general audiences won’t get confused by seeing so many different character variations and alternate universes onscreen. Sure, Marvel superfans can keep up, but normies might get hung up asking why Captain America is back, why Iron Man is Doctor Doom, and (if plot reports are true) why the universes of their favorite old Marvel movies keep getting destroyed.

I’ve got my fingers and replica adamantium claws crossed that I’m wrong about all of this. Marvel used alternate universes quite well in both Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine, so there’s a chance that Avengers: Doomsday will be another critical and commercial Hulk smash of a movie. But with so many characters jammed into one movie to fight a Big Bad we haven’t even met yet, Doomsday looks like it’s on track to be a huge mess. And if Marvel spills this particular bowl of superhero soup all over the place, nobody will be coming back for more when Secret Wars rolls around!