What do the Avengers: Doomsday teasers really mean? Doctor Doom expert decodes every clue

Marvel have now released four teaser trailers for Avengers: Doomsday, featuring the return of much-loved characters such as Steve Rogers, Thor, and the X-Men. However, fans have been left disappointed by the fact that Robert Downey Jr's Doctor Doom has so far been absent.

Or has he?

If we look closely enough, follow a few Doom clues, and trust some slightly spurious mathematics, then Doom looms into view like a masked and megalomaniac Where's Wally, with huge hints as to what he's going to be up to and even when we're going to find out more.

I'm the world's leading (and also only) academic expert on Doctor Doom, with a book and a PhD all about him, and I've used my knowledge of every Doctor Doom comic ever to decode all of the Avengers: Doomsday teasers so far.

The Child-catcher

The first of the two trailers reveals that Chris Evans is returning as Captain America, aka Steve Rogers. We see him riding up to an old house where he's looking after a baby who is either his and Peggy's child or, if not, the first client in a new career as 'Nanny America'.

The second trailer, with Chris Hemworth as Thor, shows him stomping through a forest on his way to battle. As he stomps he thinks back to some quality time spent with his adopted daughter, Love, with both of them in snazzy matching jim jams.

So far so cosy, but sadly history tells us that a movie involving Doctor Doom and children is unlikely to be about the benefits of co-parenting or sleep hygiene.

For example, in the 1970 story 'The Son of Doctor Doom!' Doom claimed to have a child of his own, but it soon turned out to be a clone, grown to be a spare body which Doom could transplant his own brain into. A few years later he tried a similar trick by adopting a boy called Kristoff who had a happy childhood right up to the moment he had his mind wiped and replaced with an old recording of Doom's brainwaves, turning him into a living back-up copy.

Doctor Doom has certainly never received a 'Best Dad Ever' mug.

The other child associated with Doctor Doom is Franklin Richards, who meets him in the mid-credits scene of Fantastic Four: First Steps. These two have a terrible past together in the comics, including the time Doom kidnapped Franklin and tried to give him to Mephisto, Marvel's version of the devil, in exchange for freeing his mother's soul from hell. Like most of Doom's schemes, this did not end well.

Mephisto finally made his MCU debut in Ironheart last year, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, so there's a good chance that he'll be appearing in Doomsday as well. With all of this focus on children, particularly the children of superheroes, could Doom be gathering them up to make another deal with the devil?

Across The Multiverse

There aren't any children at in all the third trailer, which takes place in the X-Men's old headquarters, although it does give us another Doom clue to do with the multiverse.

The X-Men have an extremely complicated history in both comics and movies, with all sorts of time travel and dimensional shenanigans making it hard to keep track of what's going on without needing a sit down and a cup of tea.

In particular there are multiple versions of Professor X, including James McAvoy in First Class, and various different Patrick Stewarts in Logan, Doctor Strange And The Multiverse of Madness and Days Of Future Past. In this teaser he's dressed as he was in Days Of Future Past, but then we also see James Marsden as Cyclops in a costume identical to the one from the animated series X-Men '97, which takes place in another universe entirely.

Different parts of the multiverse co-existing in the same physical space like this is exactly what happens in the Marvel comics series Secret Wars. This sees the multiverse being saved from evil pan-dimensional aliens by none other than Doctor Doom, who takes all the coolest bits from the different universes and smushes them together into a single planet called Battleworld.

In the comics this is a great excuse for lots of variations of characters meet each other, not unlike the multiple Spider-Mans (or is it Spiders-Men?) in Far From Home. Secret Wars is likely to be the source material for Avengers: Secret Wars, next year's sequel to Avengers: Doomsday, so hopefully we'll get more of the same there.

If that's the case then we'll also see Doctor Doom ruining it all by letting his success as a hero go to his head. If only he'd been happy with saving the multiverse from evil space aliens all would have been well, but instead Doom decides to proclaim himself a god and forces everyone to worship him. As a result he has to be overthrown by a bunch of superheroes who have travelled across dimensions in a spaceship piloted by The Fantastic Four.

The War Between The Land And The Sea

If that sounds familiar it's because we've already seen a spaceship travel across dimensions piloted by The Fantastic Four at the end of Thunderbolts (or The New Avengers if Marvel insist).

Here we briefly see the FF's spaceship 'The Excelsior' arrive in universe 616, and this continues directly into the fourth and final trailer, which shows us Ben Grimm meeting Shuri and M'Baku from Black Panther as they all get ready for a big fight with a massive Atlantean army.

This army is led by Prince Namor, who is our next Doom clue.

Doom and Namor have a long history in comics as best frenemies, going all the way back to Doom's second ever appearance in Fantastic Four #6 in 1962. Here the so-called 'diabolical duo' almost succeed in destroying the FF by sending them and their entire Baxter Building headquarters into the depths of space. It only falls apart when Doctor Doom spoils it all again by double-crossing Namor, stranding him in orbit as well.

This was the first in a constant cycle of friendships and betrayals between the two, which was so popular with comics fans that in the 1970s they even had their own series together called Super-Villain Team-Up. It's been rare since then to see Namor without Doom popping by to let him down yet again, and, although they haven't met in the MCU so far, we can be sure that there's a super-villain team-up, followed by a super-villain break-up, coming up in both their futures.

The Numbers Game

Despite all this evidence of Doom's imminent arrival, we won't know for sure what he's up to until we get a proper look at Robert Downey Jr in action. For that we need to have a proper full-length trailer of him dooming it up in the mask and cape, and we might get that sooner than we expect.

The Doom clues to this are at the end of each of the four trailers, which all finish with a clock counting down to the official release of Avengers: Doomsday on 18th December this year. In every trailer the clock glitches, showing a different set of numbers, and the internet has been full of speculation about what it all means.

The first trailer, for example, briefly shows the characters '1e 24ber 02020' and these have variously been interpreted as a timecode for specific lines of dialogue in Avengers: Endgame, a clue to something unknown having happened on Christmas Eve five years ago, a code for a webpage, or a best before date for superhero sandwiches.

All of these theories have missed the most obvious answer, which is that the numbers shown relate to their positions on the countdown clock itself. For instance, the '1' is in the same position as the number of months to go, the '24' and '17' is the number of days and so on.

If we take a month to be equivalent to 28 days (stick with it, it all works out in the end) and count the respective days, months, hours and minutes from when each trailer was first released, then they all point to something happening on Sunday 8th February - the day of the 2026 Super Bowl.

Marvel have traditionally shown at least one trailer at half-time during the Super Bowl, so it's a good bet that this is when we'll finally see the first full-length trailer for Avengers: Doomsday.

If our other Doom clues are correct then it'll be full of lots more characters from different parts of the multiverse, a guest appearance from a demonic Ali G, and more back-stabbing than Celebrity Traitors. If not, we'll have to settle for Captain America's parenting advice and Thor's pyjamas.

Avengers: Doomsday will be released on 18th December 2026.

Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.