Avengers: Doomsday‘s newest trailer officially confirms which movie plays arguably the most important role in the MCU film’s setup. While the MCU timeline has long been a deeply interconnected one, some movies are always more important than others in terms of setting up its major crossover movies.
Though The Fantastic Four: First Steps naturally plays a key role in setting up Avengers: Doomsday via showing Doctor Doom in the film’s final moments, the only crucial part of the movie thus far appears to be the birth of Sue and Reeds’ son, Franklin Richards. Instead, one earlier MCU movie now appears to be arguably more important, in terms of what it means for the wider Marvel movie landscape.
Avengers: Doomsday’s X-Men Trailer Makes Deadpool & Wolverine The Most Important Movie Of The Multiverse Saga
The third Avengers: Doomsday teaser trailer has officially released on YouTube, with this preview being especially interesting because it focuses on a group who have previously been almost entirely outside of the realms of the MCU: the X-Men.
While Avengers: Doomsday‘s cast list had confirmed beforehand that a range of previous X-Men movie actors would be reprising their roles in the film, the teaser trailer shows a little of what that will look like for the 2026 MCU movie. This excitingly includes a look at Cyclops and his powers front and center, suggesting the hero may finally get his dues after his lackluster Fox movie series arc.
Interestingly, two possibilities seem equally viable here when it comes to the teaser overall. These are namely that we’re either seeing the versions of the characters that Logan and Wade Wilson saved when they rescued the Fox X-Men movie universe in Deadpool & Wolverine – which seems very likely, as it allows Doomsday to draw from one of the Multiverse Saga’s most lucrative films – or that they’re variants from a similar world.
Ultimately, this makes Deadpool & Wolverine of paramount importance either way. If these characters are indeed from the Fox X-Men universe, then their continued existence is entirely down to the 2024 movie’s titular heroes – and any universe-traveling shenanigans are likely to be tied to the main characters, who became intimately acquainted with the nature of the multiverse as well as how to travel it – and who have a bond with the Time Variance Authority who watch over the timelines.
Even if it turns out the X-Men in question are different variants, this likely only sets up several different X-Men characters from alternate universes crossing paths – since we already know a version of Beast is with Monica Rambeau in one universe after The Marvels‘ ending – which would seemingly still thus tie back to the Fox X-Men universe all the same.
Avengers: Doomsday’s X-Men Story Would Be A Far Greater Risk Without Deadpool & Wolverine’s Success
Bringing the X-Men back and making them a part of the MCU after fans have hoped for the characters to appear in some form for over a decade is a decision that makes sense on a lot of levels. However, the decision to bring back the Fox X-Men is one with far greater prospective risks – most crucially, that tampering with it now risks sabotaging what audiences loved about the film universe years after its seeming end.
As such, Deadpool & Wolverine is even more key to the MCU’s roadmap forward for Avengers: Doomsday and beyond. This is both in that it began to tie the two Marvel movie worlds together without needing as much in the way of crossovers, and in the sense that it proved to audiences that the MCU could be a place where these characters were handled well, and in a way that justified figures returning years after their stories appeared to be entirely over.