It all leads to Doom: ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ cast unveiled

Hey, it’s a spring edition of the Friday newsletter. If you’re like me, you’ve spent the past week wondering if you have a cold or are suffering from allergies. (I see you, cherry blossoms ...) Go ahead and sneeze as loud as you want. I won’t judge.

I will, however, render my verdict on the ocean now that sharks have started making sounds. The ocean is theirs. They can split it up with the orcas however they see fit. The land is ours and the sea is theirs, just as nature intended.

More like “dead”-action remakes, huh?

Snow White bombed last weekend (check out what The Hollywood Reporter’s Pamela McClintock had to say about the film’s box office hopes), and I’m gonna keep calling for an end to Disney’s live-action remakes. Here’s what I said about Snow White’s box office failure earlier this week:

It’s time for someone at Disney to start questioning whether these live-action remakes are worth it. After the studio’s Little Mermaid remake opened with $95.6 million in 2023, the bottom has fallen out for these cash grabs. A $35.4 million debut for Mufasa: The Lion King. A $43 million debut for Snow White.

It’s cute to pretend that any of these live-action remakes have made money because people wanted them and/or they were good instead of the more likely reality that parents just need G/PG movies to take their kids to, and it doesn’t matter if it’s one of these remakes, A Garfield Movie or the latest Minions flick.

Instead of continuing to pour money into live-action slop like Mufasa, Snow White and Lilo & Stitch, Disney would be better served steering those resources toward original animated movies. And if the studio absolutely can’t break away from revisiting established franchises, why not make a real animated sequel to The Lion King or Lilo & Stitch?

I mean, look at Moana 2. That movie made over $1 billion worldwide — and it was an accident. You can see the seams of how Disney transformed what was supposed to be a Disney+ series into a theatrical release, but it still had more creative integrity than the live-action Moana remake currently in the works.

No one wants to see Disney remake its older stuff. And the newer stuff doesn’t need an update. (Seriously. Why are we remaking Moana a decade after it hit theaters?)

• 📖 Gal Gadot’s Snow White Song Is a Remarkable Anti-Performance (Jackson McHenry, Vulture): “Suddenly, the song becomes instead about … girl power? And the Queen reacting to people who want her to be nice, because she’s a woman? ‘Well, nice will only get you nowhere,’ she sings, ‘Nice won’t get the doing done. Ambitious girls must be vicious girls. And boy we have fun!’ It’s a nice rhyme scheme, but what does it mean … What does it mean???”
• 📖 Rachel Zegler Is Innocent: Why The Internet Is So Incredibly Wrong About One Of Our Most Promising Actors (BJ Colangelo, SlashFilm): “Rachel Zegler is being set up to take the fall for a multimillion-dollar loss, and the people setting her up for it are banking on racist, misogynistic hatred on the internet to do the dirty work for them.”

“Because you’re soulless”

Woo boy, this week’s The White Lotus was a real good lesson for why you don’t do drugs, kids. Especially if you come from a weirdly close family.

• 📖 Duke University Wants No Part of The White Lotus (Scott Cacciola, The New York Times): “With the university in the N.C.A.A. tournament this month, The White Lotus has provided material for potential memes — the image of Mr. Ratliff looking distraught in his Duke T-shirt, with a gun to his head, for one. A post on X that suggested that the image would emerge as ‘an all-time meme’ if Duke were to lose has received more than three million views and has been liked more than 59,000 times.”
• 📖 Customer Reviews Of The White Lotus Family Of Resorts (Brian Grubb, type click type): “Turns out someone got murdered like two weeks after I was there. I would have liked to have been there for that. I watch a lot of true crime and I bet I could have solved it.”

Book nook

I wrapped up two books this week, adding Conclave and Antimatter Blues to my 2025 reading pile.

I’m still surprised that Robert Harris’ Conclave got turned into an Oscar-nominated film. It was a good read, but I guess I don’t have the vision to have seen it as a prestige film. Most of the changes made for the movie made sense, but something was missing when you lose Jacopo Lomeli/Thomas Lawrence’s inner thoughts.

I loved Antimatter Blues, the sequel to Edward Ashton’s Mickey7. Ashton’s successful sequel made me further mourn what was lost in Bong Joon-ho’s adaptation of the book into Mickey 17. There’s no way Antimatter Blues can even be made into a sequel based on the changes Bong made.

NEWS, NOTES & TRAILERS

Doomsday on a Wednesday

We knew that the cast of Avengers: Doomsday was going to be big — and now we know just how big.

In an hourslong livestream on Wednesday, Marvel Studios slowly unveiled the actors we can expect to see in the next Avengers movie. (Character names weren’t used, which feels like a red flag for a movie where Robert Downey Jr. is playing a character who isn’t Iron Man, but let’s assume everyone is playing who we’ve previously seen them play.)

The announcements started in predictable fashion, kicking off with Chris Hemsworth before adding Vanessa Kirby, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Letitia Wright, Paul Rudd, Wyatt Russell, Tenoch Huerta Mejia, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Simu Liu, Florence Pugh, Kelsey Grammer, Lewis Pullman, Danny Ramirez, Joseph Quinn, David Harbour, Winston Duke and Hannah John-Kamen.

Not surprising that this part of the list was heavy on actors from Captain America: Brave New World and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but it’s definitely interesting to see how many actors from Thunderbolts* are in the mix for Doomsday. It’s long been my belief that the asterisk in the Thunderbolts* title is hiding that this film is really Dark Avengers (MCU: Reign of Marvel Studios co-author Dave Gonzales thinks it’s New Avengers), and that theory really makes sense seeing this cast.

The next reveal was Tom Hiddleston, which tells me that Downey’s Doom is coming after Loki and the Sacred Timeline.

After Hiddleston, the cast announcement took a somewhat unexpected turn, with chairs for Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming, Rebecca Romijn, James Marsden and Channing Tatum.

I know people are hyped at the potential to see Marsden’s Cyclops leading a version of the X-Men wearing comic-accurate outfits, but Downey’s Doom is absolutely killing off the Fox X-Men in Doomsday’s opening scene.