Can we take a break from cynicism?

Oh, my gosh.

What should have been a remarkably fun announcement from Marvel and Disney has taken on a life of its own. And I am not surprised. But yeah...I'm still disappointed.

For those who may not have heard yet, Marvel Studios released the first full trailer for Avengers: Doomsday on July 20. The movie arrives in theaters on December 18, 2026.

The timing was interesting. San Diego Comic-Con officially begins July 23, with Preview Night on July 22. Marvel decided it did not need to wait until then to show us Doomsday. Which begs the obvious question: If Marvel was willing to release the full trailer before Comic-Con, what in the hell are they holding back for this weekend?

When I started writing this, roughly seven hours after the trailer appeared, the YouTube counter was already sitting just under 24 million views. That number will be obsolete by the time most people read this, but the point is simple: The interest is there.

We've waited seven years for the return of The Avengers, and we did this while existing in a world where the pandemic ruled the theaters and took the wind out of the industry's sails in more than a few ways. During that time, the entertainment industry was forced to rewrite its plans on the fly and Marvel's carefully constructed next chapter repeatedly came apart in its hands.

So, the internet has decided that the trailer is boring.

Not everyone, of course. But the reliably vocal minority of commenters has once again arrived to inform the rest of us that it is far too sophisticated to enjoy any of this.

The comments range from legitimate criticism to the usual performance of being unimpressed:

"Still have not in any way, shape, or form explained what this movie is except: Don't you want your favorite toys mashed together?"

Another:

"Is this a real trailer? It looks like another Disney marketing cameo reel."

And another:

"I think the problem for me is that this doesn't feel like the culmination of anything. There's been exactly zero Avengers movies without Chris Evans, so his 'return' doesn't leave much of an impression on me. This is also the fourth time Disney has trotted out the X-Men toys they bought from Fox."

This one at least made me laugh:

"I cannot express to you how excited I am to have to watch at least eight middling Marvel films and several TV series I skipped first time round in order to understand what the hell is going on in this."

Then there was this:

"The cast is stacked with heroes whose movies all disappointed or outright bombed. Sam Wilson Capt. America, Falcon, the Thunderbolts, Fantastic Four. I'm surprised they didn't throw the Eternals and Marvels in there for good measure."

It's this comment with which I take particular umbrage. Not because Marvel has never disappointed, and not because all of those films were financial triumphs. I take issue with it because it takes several different realities and crushes them into one sneering sentence. The movies supposedly failed, so the characters must be failures, and therefore including them in an Avengers movie is itself a joke.

But when we look at the movies themselves, and look at them from a standpoint of audience scores, we see a different picture.

Captain America: Brave New World pulled in $200.5 million domestically with a 75 percent audience score. Thunderbolts* made less at the box office, $190.3 million, but audiences loved it, 93 percent. The Fantastic Four: First Steps did the best of the three, $274.3 million domestically and a 90 percent score to match.

To be clear, those are audience scores, not professional critical scores.

And because I am willing to be a little bitch about this, let us include the commenter's super-clever dig at two other movies: Eternals earned $164.9 million domestically with a 77 percent audience score, and The Marvels made just $84.5 million but still landed a 79 percent score with the people who actually showed up.

Captain America: Brave New World and Eternals were both rated rotten by critics. The Marvels was a commercial failure. Thunderbolts* was extremely well received but did not translate that affection into the kind of worldwide box office Marvel probably wanted. A domestic gross by itself is also not a definitive statement of fiduciary success. These movies are enormously expensive to produce and market.

But the mildly amusing problem with the original comment remains: Three of its five supposed punchlines were well received by critics and audiences alike. All five received positive audience scores. The people who actually bought tickets and rated these movies were generally pleased with what they saw...sometimes overwhelmingly so!

I get it that the audience scores are a bit self-selecting. The people most likely to pay to see a Marvel movie are also the people most likely to enjoy a Marvel movie. But is that not part of the point? These characters have audiences.

As for myself, I love Sam Wilson as Captain America. Yelena and Kamala Khan? I love seeing strong women who kick ass with humor in tow. And I guarantee David Harbour's Red Guardian will steal the scene at least once in the Doomsday movie.

And Marvel's problem is not that it has created nothing worthwhile since Avengers: Endgame. Its problem is that Infinity War and Endgame were so enormous that everything afterward has been treated as hot garbage.

Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame were not merely successful franchise installments. They were cultural touchstones. People rearranged their lives to see them. The silence in a crowded theater when Thanos snapped his fingers?

Good hell.

That was something you could physically feel. And then, a year later, entire audiences erupted over Captain America lifting Mjölnir. I think I may have peed a little when I heard Sam utter the words "On your left."

But those moments were earned over more than a decade. By the time Endgame arrived, Marvel had spent 11 years and 22 films teaching audiences to care about these people. Tony Stark was not simply a recognizable character. We watched him become Iron Man, fall in love, make terrible choices, try to fix those choices and finally reach the end of his character arc.

Endgame was not the normal operating condition of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, let alone the movie industry as a whole. It was the return on an investment that had been gathering since 2008. Endgame may never happen again. That is not an insult to Doomsday. It is a recognition of what made Endgame special.

There are legitimate reasons that Doomsday does not yet feel like the culmination of something in the same way Infinity War did. The post-Endgame universe has been scattered. Characters (Shang Chi, I'm looking at you) have been introduced and then left untouched for years. Plotlines (Um, mutants? Where art thou) have been planted without meaningful follow-up. The relationship between the movies and Disney+ became confusing. I think many people stopped feeling rewarded for keeping up with the lore.

But I mainly blame two things, and they were largely outside of Disney/Marvel's control: The pandemic, and Jonathan Majors.

When the pandemic started and the schedule collapsed, the connective tissue collapsed with it. When Majors was convicted of assault and harassment, the studio abandoned the Kang storyline, leaving years of planning to be abandoned or radically reconstructed from scratch.

That's no small job. It's not just Chris Hemsworth's salary at stake. When a studio has to tear apart and rebuild years of planning because of a global pandemic and the criminal conviction of the actor at the center of its next saga, that disruption does not stop with executives and movie stars worrying about the payments on a third boat.

A production is an entire temporary economy. It is stagehands, electricians, costume workers, drivers, editors and hundreds of other people whose names most audiences will never know. It is also the smaller vendors, local crews and support businesses that depend on those productions happening when they are supposed to happen. When release calendars collapse, scripts are rewritten, roles are recast and entire storylines are abandoned, thousands of ordinary working people absorb the instability.

And yes...I know. None of that is an excuse for a lazy, terrible movie that phones it in.

But this makes the problem more complicated than "Disney should have planned better." Sometimes the machine is broken because the world is broken. Try to have some empathy for the people trying to put it back together.

All I am trying to say is...take a breath. Step back from your keyboard and consider your perspective. Pan the camera back...way back. This is entertainment. But it's also thousands of unseen lives working in the background to push their industry forward. That's no small task. It's a pleasure to see the "endgame" of seven years of cancellations, revisions, rewrites, and studio upheaval. Even if the movie stinks (which come on...will it, really?), the worst thing that can happen is that we move forward with a clean slate for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I didn't have an hour to give to this today, but I gave it anyway. That should tell you something. Anyway, my money is on the safe bet. RDJ proves to us why his casting was more than fan service, and we get another five years minimum of anticipation that rivals the lead up to Infinity War and Endgame.