Kevin Feige Confirms the Marvel Comic That Inspired Avengers: Doomsday

Even though it releases this year, we still know very little about Avengers: Doomsday. Sure, we know that the main cast will sit in nice chairs, and we know that Steve Rogers, Thor, the X-Men, and the Wakandans will return in Doomsday, but even the teasers released last year were “stories” and “clues,” not necessarily scenes from the film. Heck, we still don’t even know which Marvel Comics will be adapted for the film.

Until now. Speaking to EW after debuting footage at CinemaCon, Kevin Feige confirmed the central storyline. “We’re not talking too much about story, but I think people know that the story of Doomsday is inspired by a very famous comic run in which universes are colliding and earths encounter one another and different timelines encounter one another,” he said.

Feige is, of course, talking about Secret Wars, the 2015 series written by Jonathan Hickman and illustrated by Esad Ribić. Well, technically, he’s talking about the run-up to Secret Wars, which began in earnest when Hickman began writing the series Avengers and New Avengers in 2013.

New Avengers focused on the Illuminati, a secret collection of the most influential or brilliant men in the Marvel Universe: Iron Man, Reed Richards, Namor, Black Bolt, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Professor X, and (initially) Captain America. After discovering the existence of Incursions, in which the Earths of two universes collide and eradicate those respective realities, the Illuminati worked covertly to find a way to stop it, and even destroyed another world to save their own.

Elements of New Avengers have already made their way into the MCU, with a variation of the Illuminati appearing in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which also ends with Clea (Charlize Theron, remember?) recruiting Stephen Strange to stop Incursions. Samuel Sterns’s warning to Sam at the end of Captain America: Brave New World also recalls a New Avengers plot line, in which a more overtly villainous version of the Illuminati begins attacking other realities.

However, we haven’t seen much from Hickman’s run on the mainline Avengers book. That story begins after the first arc of New Avengers. When Steve Rogers objects to the group’s extreme measures, the Illuminati erases his memory of their actions, including the existence of Incursions. Out of guilt, Tony Stark teams with Steve to launch the Avengers Machine, a version of the team with a massive line-up that spans nations and planets.

Looking at the cast of Avengers: Doomsday, one gets the sense that the heroes of the MCU are building their own Avengers Machine. Even though we know that the New Avengers (a.k.a. the Thunderbolts, still under the control of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine) and Sam Wilson’s Avengers are at odds, they’ll certainly come together to fight Doctor Doom. Throw in heroes from other realities, including the Fantastic Four and the Fox X-Men, and we have enough for a multi-dimensional Avengers line-up.

Will that be enough to thwart Doctor Doom, the greatest threat the Marvel Universe has ever faced? The answer to that question is just one of the many things we still don’t know about Avengers: Doomsday.

Avengers: Doomsday comes to theaters on December 18, 2026.