Posted in: Marvel, Marvel Studios, Movies, TV | Tagged: avengers: doomsday

Women, TV Heroes Get The Short End Of Avengers: Doomsday Stick, So Far

Marvel spent 5+ hours introducing us to the cast of Avengers: Doomsday, and by the time the dust settled, women and TV heroes were noticeably absent.

If you missed the shenanigans this morning, Marvel decided to announce the cast of Avengers: Doomsday as the film heads into production. That isn't that surprising and it also isn't surprising that they decided to do a live event on YouTube. They have done this a couple of times, with the most recent being a very early wake-up for the launch of the first trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps. However, while that stream only wasted a little over an hour of everyone's time, they decided to up their game with today's stream.

The idea isn't a bad one. They would reveal the Avengers: Doomsday cast one by one by panning to chairs with names on the back. That is all well and good, but they decided to put around 10 minutes between each reveal. So, by the time everything wrapped up, it was five hours later, and we had a cast list with some notable things missing. While some will say that Spider-Man or Doctor Strange are missing, what also appears to be missing is almost any connection to the television side of Marvel and a massive gender disparity, with only five of the twenty-seven announced cast members being women. While sources, according to The Hollywood Reporter, are currently saying that Marvel isn't done announcing cast members, it's still concerning to see so few women and practically no one from TV right out of the gate.

The Avengers: Doomsday Cast Is Very Male And Movie Focused

When Marvel first made the jump to television, the divide between the TV side and the movie side was very large and seemed to only grow larger as more and more shows were released. However, when Marvel Television became part of Marvel Studios, it really seemed the integration was going to be much more fluid. The actions of the shows would impact the movies and so forth. In the last five years, Marvel has introduced us to plenty of new heroes that made their debut on Disney+, and some of them have made the jump to movies while others have not.

The Avengers seemed like the time for all of the heroes, both from streaming and the movies, to unite in a big way. However, with the roster released for Avengers: Doomsday, there are not many faces from television so far. We have a few that made their debut on TV, then had a movie, and are now on the big screen, like Danny Ramirez as Falcon and Wyatt Russell as US Agent, but that's all. No Moon Knight, no Ms. Marvel, no Daredevil, no She-Hulk. So, for all of its posturing about how important the shows were to the movies, we get two supporting players originally from shows, and that's it.

On top of all of that, as the Avengers: Doomsday livestream continued, it was becoming more and more apparent that this was going to be a very male-heavy team. Despite some of the most powerful heroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe canonically being women, out of the twenty-seven announced characters today, only five of them were women. Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, Hannah John-Kaman as Ghost, and Rebecca Romijn, reprising her role as Mystique from the X-Men films, are the only women on the battlefield so far. There was a large push to even out the gender disparity as we headed into the end of the Infinity Saga, but it seems we have taken several steps back in the last couple of years. Considering how Marvel is trying to play things safe, going back to more men than women worked for the first Avengers film, maybe it will work again for the fifth and sixth.

Now, the casts of Infinity War and Endgame had some pretty significant differences, so maybe things will even out more once they announce Avengers: Secret Wars. It sounds like there are still people who need to be announced; at least, that is what some sources are saying, so that means we all sat through a five-hour stream for an incomplete cast list. Not sure who is the bigger clown in the scenario, but it might be us.  Avengers: Doomsday has officially started production and will be released in theaters on May 1, 2026. Avengers: Secret Wars is set to be released on May 7, 2027.

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