Rather than debuting 100% of new footage, Marvel Studios’ latest look at Avengers: Doomsday reworks some scenes fans have already seen in the first trailer. The Doomsday footage rollout so far has come in stages, starting with four character-focused teasers in late 2025 and early 2026 that spotlighted different heroes. From there, the focus shifted to Doctor Doom (Robert Downey Jr.) in both the full trailer and especially the D23 Special Look, with Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) narrating his tragic backstory. While the new trailer gave us more Doom, it still featured some past moments that have now been visually upgraded.
Fans are now just shy of four months away from Doomsday hitting theaters on December 18, marking the first Avengers movie in over seven years. Marvel Studios is making its return in a big way, releasing Avengers: Endgame Encore in theaters next month and drawing a direct line between the two films. That said, Marvel’s design and CGI team clearly made some visual adjustments between the Doomsday‘s July 20 release and the Special Look that dropped on August 15.
The most notable change in the new footage is the moment when Thor (Chris Hemsworth) flies toward Doctor Doom with Stormbreaker, fully electrified. This moment is probably the biggest selling point so far from the movie, especially with Doom stopping Thor’s (normally lethal) attack with just two fingers.
When taking a look at this moment from the Special Look, Thor is in focus, with Doom awaiting him. And while it may seem like the exact same shot as before, it certainly isn’t.
Taking a glance back at the first trailer, the silver plates on Thor’s costume are smaller and off-center. In addition, Thor’s sleeves are slightly tweaked. Also, there’s remarkably less debris around Doom in the non-updated version.
When compared side by side, the top two plates on Thor’s chest and the general surroundings of Doom stand out the most.
Closing in on Doom, as Thor rears back his magical axe, fans get their best look yet at this moment in the Special Look.
It’s easy to notice when looking at the different frames (of the same moment) that the newer trailer shows what could be broken parts of Sentinels around Doom. No such detail is in the first trailer, which debuted at CinemaCon in April.
Marvel Studios is likely making the most adjustments to the environments around its characters in post-production, and it’ll be interesting to see whether this epic trailer moment has even more changes by the time of release.
Shifting away from that dark battleground with Thor and Doom, the other most eye-catching upgrades have happened around Shuri (Letitia Wright) and the Wakandans.
The first image comes from the Black Panther-focused teaser released online in January. It shows Shuri walking toward a desolate, desert wasteland of nothingness.
It turns out, there’s a lot more there than was initially presented. The official trailer shows Shuri walking toward two massive walls of water holding back the parted ocean, with (what seems like) Talokan’s exposed seafloor stretched out between them.
A Wakandan aircraft sits to the right, seemingly the ship she is about to board in the initial Doomsday looks.
This is a dramatic difference in appearance, with the updated footage providing much more context for fans and showing how Tenoch Huerta’s Namor may factor into the fight.
When zooming in even closer, it’s the same story: Shuri previously seemed to be aimlessly walking toward nothing in her Black Panther suit.
Now, there’s a clear context surrounding her, and this could even be the first time she’s introduced to audiences when Doomsday plays in theaters this winter.
A later moment in that early teaser also showed Shuri walking with M’Baku (Winston Duke), leading the Dora Milaje. Within the context of that teaser, M’Baku just meets Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) alone.
The full trailer reveals that The Thing wasn’t alone: Sue Storm, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) were standing right there the whole time, along with other Avengers.
Marvel clearly scrubbed them from the teaser so its soft-launch rollout wouldn’t spoil this first meeting between the Fantastic Four, the New Avengers, and the Wakandans. In this context, it’s also made clear that most of the Earth-based teams meet at Avengers Tower before heading to Wakanda for backup.
This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, especially not with the history of Marvel Studios and the Avengers franchise in general. Marvel sometimes uses its marketing to misdirect fans. One of the most memorable examples is the ending of the first Infinity War trailer, which featured an assembling-hero sequence that included the Hulk. That scene, in no form or fashion, was in the final cut of the movie.
The other MCU film of 2026 had a similar story. The international trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day showed noticeably upgraded VFX compared to the original release, most evident in the Spider-Man vs. Tarantula boat fight.
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Even with two trailers and four teasers out, a handful of confirmed Doomsday cast members still haven’t shown their faces. Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) and Beast (Kelsey Grammer) remain unseen. Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) is missing too, though that tracks with Steve Rogers seemingly leaving his universe behind in the footage. Some fans are even speculating that Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) or Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) could show up, though neither Avenger has been confirmed.
Meanwhile, one shot inside the rebuilt Avengers Tower has fans doing their own frame-by-frame investigation. There’s a gap in the lineup near the Fantastic Four, and suspect Doctor Doom himself could be the one digitally erased from the scene. This would certainly be something Marvel would want to keep secret, as there’s a possibility that Victor von Doom is not presented as the villain of the movie to begin with, or at least not to our heroes.
In 2025, Thunderbolts* pulled a similar trick, just reverse it: promotional footage showed Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) standing with the rest of the team at Avengers Tower, between Ghost and US Agent. However, she never actually appears in that moment in the finished film, since her character dies before the Thunderbolts fully form as a team.
At the end of the day, none of this should be alarming in regard to Doomsday, especially with four more months until release; it’s OK for Marvel to continue tweaking and perfecting the CGI-forward scenes.
