Avengers: Doomsday is a funeral that already has a trailer. That should worry you.

D23 gave us RDJ’s Doom, returning faces, and a December 18 date. The footage looks expensive. The mood feels like a wake they sold tickets to.

The new Doomsday trailer is all eclipse light and a man in green who used to sell us the opposite religion. Robert Downey Jr. as Doom is a casting dare that the hall in Anaheim was built to cheer. Chris Evans and Hayley Atwell standing there made it look like the old firm never dissolved. December 18 is circled. The internet did the rest.

My theory is not about who lives. It is about what the movie thinks an ending is. Endgame worked because it spent years making the losses expensive. This phase has spent years making the absences temporary. You cannot do a funeral for a company that keeps rehiring the pallbearers.

A saga ender cannot also be a reunion commercial. One of those jobs will lose.

Watch the trailer again with the sound off. It is a museum. Broken statues, a cloak on a chair, a sky that has already decided. That is striking. It is also the visual language of a franchise that knows the living characters are not as interesting as the ones it already used up.

If Doomsday wants to matter, it has to refuse a few encores. Kill a version of the team and mean it. Let the X-Men movie that is still two years away be the new sentence, not a mid-credits apology. Otherwise we are just attending a very loud memorial for a phase that already ended in the group chat.