Simu Liu Just Put a Lot of Pressure on ‘Avengers: Doomsday'

I don’t need to tell you that Avengers: Doomsday has a lot riding on it. The MCU is still a global powerhouse, but it isn’t rocking the world like it once did. The Fantastic Four: First Steps brought in a little over $500 million, which isn’t necessarily a failure, but by Marvel standards, it ain’t exactly a home run. The fourth Tom Holland Spider-Man film will likely do well, and then, we get to the MCU’s long-awaited crossover.

Avengers: Doomsday already had a lot riding on it after they had to pivot from Jonathan Majors as the lead villain. They switched directors, started adding a bunch of Fox-era X-Men to the picture, and brought back Robert Downey Jr. to play Doctor Doom for what I can only assume was an entire dump truck full of money. On top of all of that, Kevin Feige has hinted at a reboot of sorts after the next two Avengers films, so this will be a swan song for this version of the MCU.

Now, Simu Liu is adding even more pressure by teasing that the film will have some real heart. In a recent interview with ScreenRant, he teased the scope of the crossover film. “I mean, there are just so many actors in it, and getting to work with those people as peers is really incredible because I grew up watching so many of them,” he teased. “It feels, in a lot of ways, like a love letter to the entire genre of superhero movies. And I think there’s something really fun about that.”

That is all pretty standard for teasing a superhero film. It was the next bit that stuck out to me, with Liu saying that the movie is, “for all the misfits and the weirdos and the underdogs that grew up reading comic books and feeling like there was hope for them somehow - that it didn’t matter if they didn’t fit in - I think there’s just always a special place in my heart for that entire genre.” Huh!

First of all, it’s always funny now to think about comic book readers being misfits because that’s not really the case anymore. It certainly was. But a lot has changed over the last twenty years as far as the perception of comic books is concerned, and the MCU had a big hand in that change. I’d argue that its popularity helped make comic books more accepted.

But that’s not what Simu Liu is getting at. He’s teasing a big, spectacle-driven movie that also has heart. I love Avengers: Infinity War. It’s an enormous event film that is packed with heart. The team that made that film is making Doomsday. Can they recreate that magic? I hope so! There’s certainly a world where this ends up being the last breaths of a franchise as the media landscape faces a strange future of mergers and acquisitions. But it could also go out with a bang, and give us something that lives up to the legacy of this storied franchise.