Shang-Chi Star Calls Avengers: Doomsday a Superhero Love Letter

With a title like Doomsday, it sure seems like the next Avengers outing will be a glum one. The film will not only see the great Fantastic Four nemesis Doctor Doom arrive in the form of the Avengers’ fallen comrade Tony Stark, but likely also feature the destruction of multiple realities, including the happy world that Logan and Wade Wilson thought they saved in Deadpool & Wolverine. Finally, if indeed Doomsday and its follow-up Avengers: Secret Wars follow the same pattern as Infinity War and Endgame, then the former will end with the defeat of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

In short, Doomsday sounds like a real bummer for everyone. Everyone, that is, except for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings star Simu Liu. When ScreenRant asked Liu if he had any words to describe Doomsday, the actor responded, “Yeah, three: dream come true.”

“It feels, in a lot of ways, like a love letter to the entire genre of superhero movies. And I think there’s something really fun about that,” Liu continued.

Given what we know about Doomsday, Liu’s right to describe the movie in such epic terms. Doomsday and Secret Wars close out Marvel’s Phase Six, the final chapter in the Multiverse Saga. While the Multiverse Saga has been unquestionably rockier than the franchise’s first three phases, Doomsday and Secret Wars plan to capture the excitement of Infinity War and Endgame by going even bigger.

Doomsday will certainly continue the ongoing story of the mainline MCU, which, we know from Thunderbolts* a.k.a. New Avengers, currently has two teams calling themselves the Avengers, one fronted by Bucky Barnes and another lead by Captain America Sam Wilson. The series will see the return of highly-anticipated characters such as Namor from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Shang-Chi, whose debut movie is easily one of the Multiverse Saga standouts, and will bring the Fantastic Four into the mainline universe.

But it will also reach back to the origins of the third wave of superhero movies, bringing back Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, and other stars of Fox X-Men franchise that began in 2000. And, with the return of Robert Downey Jr. and directors the Russo Brothers, Doomsday is also recalling Marvel’s glory days.

One person who isn’t coming back, of course, is Kang the Conquerer, the originally intended big bad of the Multiverse Saga. Kang famously was jettisoned from Marvel’s plans after news of actor Jonathan Majors’s bad behavior came to light. More than just replace the big villain, Marvel totally reworked plans for the next Avengers movie, which was to be helmed by Legend of the Ten Rings filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton and would have had Shang-Chi in the lead.

Cretton was reassigned to direct Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but there’s no word yet on what role Shang-Chi will have in the next Avengers film. Yet, if Liu’s comments are any indication, he’s just glad to be part of the celebration. “I mean, there are just so many actors in it,” he says of Doomsday, “and getting to work with those people as peers is really incredible because I grew up watching so many of them.”

Even if things go badly for Shang-Chi and the other characters that Liu grew up watching, at least we can rest assured that the actors portraying these horrible events had a good time doing it.

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