The time keeps ticking down until the release of Avengers: Doomsday. It’s still over 11 months away, of course. Still, that hasn’t stopped Marvel Studios from continuing the march of new teaser trailers for the sake of getting people excited about it. We will say, each one has made us more excited than the last, mostly due to what’s actually shown. The first one with Steve Rogers looked bizarrely lifeless. The second with Thor felt portentous but not exciting, while the third with the X-Men really got us hooked. Now we have the fourth, which is the first to show us what looks like an actual scene from the movie. It certainly has the most characters. Take a look at the new Avengers: Doomsday teaser trailer that shows our favorite Wakandans meeting the Fantastic Four!
This time out in the Avengers: Doomsday trailer, we get Shuri (Letitia Wright) in cool new armor, talking about losing everyone she’s loved and how a king has a responsibility to prepare his people for the afterlife. Over this second part, we see Atlanteans and Namor (Tenoch Huerta), indicating perhaps that he’s the king who needs to prepare his people. Shuri walks along with King M’Baku (Winston Duke) and some Dora Milaje on some kind of desert. M’Baku introduces himself to someone who turns out to be none other than Ben “The Thing” Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) of The Fantastic Four.
This is a very fun, if brief, meeting and fully sums up who Ben Grimm is. Additionally, this Avengers: Doomsday teaser trailer reveals what, to Marvel Comics fans, is a supremely important moment. Both Black Panther and the nation of Wakanda made their debut in the pages of Fantastic Four, issue number 52. And while Namor, aka the Sub-Mariner, had been a Golden Age character, from all the way back in 1939, he returned in the Silver Age as a going concern in Fantastic Four number 5. Namor has also been a rival of Reed Richards’ for Sue’s affection for decades. So for the Fantastic Four to finally appear on screen alongside Namor and the people of Wakanda, it’s a true “at last” moment.
Naturally, we’ll need to wait to see if indeed Namor interacts with the Fantastic Four in Avengers: Doomsday—they don’t actually meet in this trailer. However, it seems quite likely Marvel’s First Family have crashed landed their ship in the desert, possibly even in Wakanda itself. This looks like Shuri and M’Baku acting as an Earth envoy, not aware that Ben isn’t an alien. My fellow Nerdist writer Eric Diaz believes, as each teaser has been about children and their potential loss, that the Fantastic Four end up in our universe for help in retrieving Franklin Richards from Dr. Doom.
Whether or not that theory proves to be true, we have to say we’re much more excited for the X-Men and Fantastic Four of it all than the return of either Steve Rogers or Thor. No offense to those very beefy boys.
Avengers: Doomsday will premiere on December 18, 2026.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.