The latest Avengers: Doomsday teaser hit online after theater previews with Avatar: Fire and Ash, spotlighting Wakanda’s finest against looming chaos. Letitia Wright’s Shuri suits up in a sleek Black Panther armor upgrade, voiceover heavy with loss as she vows to protect her people from an unseen doom.
Winston Duke’s M’Baku steps forward as king, a nod to Wakanda Forever’s throne shift, flanked by Tenoch Huerta’s Namor sporting a comic-true black outfit and his cousin Namora.
Shuri laments losing everyone close, hinting at battles post-Wakanda Forever that leave her as the last guardian standing.
Namor’s alliance flip from foe to potential ally raises eyebrows, especially with Talokan facing multiverse stakes against Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom. This clip builds on Phase 6’s Wakanda arc, where post-T’Challa grief fuels a fiercer nation ready for cosmic war.
Fans buzz over M’Baku’s “King M’Baku of Wakanda” intro, confirming his rule and setting up Wakanda’s frontline role in the Avengers clash. The trailer’s grave tone echoes prior teasers, priming viewers for Doomsday’s December 18, 2026, release as the Multiverse Saga’s climax.
Thing Crashes the Party in Classic Style
Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm bursts in as the rocky Thing, straight from The Fantastic Four: First Steps, shaking hands with M’Baku in a crowd-pleasing beat. Grimm deadpans, “Ben, Yancy Street, between Broome and Grand,” his Brooklyn grit clashing hilariously with Wakandan royalty.
This marks Marvel’s First Family crossing from Earth-828 to Earth-616, teased in Thunderbolts’ post-credits ship sighting.
Avengers: Doomsday (Credit: Disney+)
The encounter pays off; Fantastic Four ties to Black Panther lore, where T’Challa first crossed paths with the team in classic comics. While Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards, Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm, and Joseph Quinn’s Johnny Storm sit this out, their confirmed spots promise fuller FF involvement against Doom.
Moss-Bachrach’s beardless, full-suited Thing channels pure comic energy, hinting at VFX wizardry blending retro charm with MCU scale.
Comic buffs spot Namor-Sue tension potential, given her canon flirtations, which could spark drama with Reed amid Doom’s schemes. The trailer’s light moment cuts the dread, mirroring how prior clips balanced Thor’s prayer or X-Men’s unity with hype.
Multiverse Mashup Fuels Epic Payoffs
This fourth teaser slots into Marvel’s drip-feed strategy, following Steve Rogers’ return, Thor’s family plea, and X-Men icons like Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and Ian McKellen’s Magneto.
Each drop leaked online before official bows, building frenzy for the Russo brothers’ return to helm the Avengers epic. Doomsday assembles heavyweights against Downey’s Doom, whose Latverian threat spans realities post-Fantastic Four’s Franklin Richards tease.
Wakanda-FF links nod to comics where Namor and the Four tangle often, now amplified by multiverse rifts pulling heroes together.
Online reactors praise the grounded banter amid spectacle, with Reddit threads dissecting timeline tweaks and post-credits callbacks. Box office watchers eye Doomsday’s pull after Phase 5 slumps, betting Wakanda’s star power and FF novelty revive MCU momentum.
President Trump’s reelection era adds cultural layers, as Marvel navigates superhero fatigue with bold crossovers blending legacy and new blood.
Shuri’s arc from reluctant heir to battle-hardened Panther anchors emotional stakes, while Thing’s fish-out-of-water vibe promises comic relief in the fray. Leaks and teases keep socials ablaze, from TikTok breakdowns to X debates on Namor’s redemption.
The clip ends affirming, “The Wakandans and the Fantastic Four will return in Avengers: Doomsday,” priming fans for Secret Wars next year.
With Spider-Man: Brand New Day looming first, this fusion signals Marvel’s all-in push to reclaim box office dominance through character-driven spectacle. Critics laud the organic team builds, contrasting Endgame’s sprawl with focused hero spotlights.
When The Naked Gun arrived in August 2025 , the idea of Liam Neeson fronting a broad slapstick parody sounded risky, yet it quickly became one of the year’s surprise comedy bright spots.
Directed by Akiva Schaffer and produced by Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door, the legacy sequel cast Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., earning strong reviews and just over 102 million dollars worldwide on a relatively modest 42 million dollar budget.
On paper, those numbers and their awards run made a follow-up feel almost inevitable. The film holds an 87 percent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, a generally favorable Metacritic rating in the mid-70s, and wins such as Best Comedy at the Critics’ Choice Awards and Best Comedy Film from the St. Louis Film Critics Association.
The key detail sits outside the frame of Neeson’s performance or the film’s reception. Schaffer explained that roughly a week after the movie opened, Paramount’s ownership effectively changed through its merger with Skydance, leaving everyone waiting to see whether the new regime actually wanted another installment.
Producer Erica Huggins has acknowledged that she and the writers already kicked around a big concept for a second film, while Schaffer says he and co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand even kept a list of potential gags, but none of that matters without a studio mandate.
Merger Math: Why A Solid Hit Still Wasn’t Enough
From a distance, shelving a sequel to a Certified Fresh comedy that more than doubled its budget looks strange, yet the merger context changes the calculus.
The 102.1 million dollar gross for The Naked Gun is respectable, but it sits in a mid-tier zone where executives typically weigh long-term franchise potential against fresh priorities set by new ownership.
The Paramount-Skydance deal folded the studio into a new corporate structure intent on rationalizing overlapping projects, trimming risk, and consolidating brands that fit a coherent slate.
In that environment, a spoof-driven comedy anchored to a single star in his seventies does not automatically rise to the top, even with a familiar logo and strong critical buzz.
By comparison, modern studio strategy tends to favor IP that can support streaming spin-offs, cross-platform tie-ins, and multiple tonal lanes, something the tightly defined Naked Gun style may struggle to provide.
The Naked Gun (Credit: Domain Entertainment)
There is also the shadow of internal creative politics around this property. Original trilogy director David Zucker has publicly said he declined executive producer credit on the reboot and later criticized various attempts to revive the franchise over the years, including earlier Ed Helms and script iterations that failed to move forward at Paramount.
While Zucker ultimately expressed satisfaction that Schaffer’s film succeeded, his long history with the brand and his clear preference for his own comedic approach have kept the conversation around any continuation unusually sensitive.
That kind of corporate pause can easily become a quiet end, especially for mid-budget comedies that do not dominate box office charts.
Fan Hopes, Franchise History, And The Long Game
For fans, the frustration comes from how effectively Neeson seemed to break his own “serious action dad” mold.
Long praised for his deadpan turn in a 2011 bit on the BBC mockumentary Life’s Too Short, he finally got a full film built around that comic persona, and critics singled out how his grave seriousness amplified the absurdity of Schaffer’s set pieces.
The reboot managed to honor Leslie Nielsen’s original performance while reframing the series through Frank Drebin’s son, a choice that critics saw as a smart way to refresh the concept without discarding its slapstick DNA.
The movie’s success also arrived at a moment when theatrical studio comedies were seen as struggling, which is partly why outlets like Time Out and The Guardian highlighted it as a standout example of how broad parody can still connect.
That context made early reports of sequel discussions from producer Erica Huggins, noted in coverage of the film’s development and awards run, feel encouraging at the time. The subsequent studio silence, followed by Schaffer’s “not planning another” clarification, therefore lands as a whiplash shift rather than a slow fade out.
However, the Naked Gun brand has a history of disappearing and then resurfacing in new forms. The original trilogy wrapped in 1994; a planned Leslie Nielsen-led fourth film stalled and was canceled in 2009; and later attempts with Ed Helms and different creative teams cycled through before this Neeson version finally reached screens three decades after the last theatrical entry.
If those metrics line up with strong viewer engagement and help the movie keep winning comedy awards, Paramount Skydance could eventually see value in returning to the well, particularly if Neeson remains open to more comedic work as he steps back from action-heavy roles, something he has hinted at in interviews with outlets like Variety.
For now, though, Schaffer’s message is clear: the people who made The Naked Gun have ideas, enthusiasm, and even a rough playbook for a second film, but ownership changes and corporate strategy have frozen the sequel in place.
Fans hoping to see Frank Drebin Jr. back on another disastrously handled case will have to treat this first outing as a self-contained victory and watch whether streaming performance, awards momentum, and evolving studio priorities ever thaw the project out of development limbo.
