Avengers: Doomsday proves Marvel can still manufacture hype with almost nothing

If, like me, you’ve been staring obsessively at the glitchy numbers at the end of the latest Avengers: Doomsday teaser trailers, you’re not alone. But before our collective tinfoil hats spin off and we disappear into a rabbit hole of rewatching and reinterpreting every past Russo Brothers' Marvel movie, take a breath: the world’s foremost Dr Doom specialist (a real thing) has taken a swing at cracking the mysterious codes Marvel has been drip-feeding fans, and the result is far less cinematic than internet lore would have you believe.

Mark Hibbett, yes, the actual academic with a PhD who’s somehow made “Doctor Doom expertise” a thing (well played), has gone frame-by-frame through the four micro-teasers Marvel has quietly rolled out in cinemas ahead of Avatar: Fire and Ash. Each ends not with a bombastic scene but with a glitchy suffix of letters and digits that have fan forums in meltdown.

Are they secret plot points? Hidden Easter eggs pointing to endgame betrayals, Doom’s multiversal gambit or some master timeline trick? Nope. Over on Radio Times Hibbett’s thesis is almost disappointingly prosaic: the jumbled numbers aren’t narrative breadcrumbs, they’re parts of the countdown clocks themselves. When you align them with trailer release dates and do some comic-book maths (yes, really), they simply point to one likely reveal date – Super Bowl Sunday, 8th February.

Avengers: Doomsday | Only in Theaters December 18, 2026 - YouTube

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Marvelous but unsurpring?

That’s right: the epic build-up isn’t hinting at Doom’s grand scheme to collapse reality, kidnap the children of heroes (plausible) or code is mind into Tony Stark (likely), it’s hinting at when Marvel wants to show us the first proper, Robert Downey Jr. in a metal mask trailer. Which, given how often Marvel uses the Super Bowl halftime to drop blockbusters’ first big looks, is exactly the sort of thing we should have expected.

The theory holds that once the final clock teaser, complete with its glitch-numbers, is aligned with the calendar, all paths lead to that February sports spectacle. There, presumably, will be the real Avengers: Doomsday trailer, complete with whatever Doom-centric chaos Marvel is saving for a massive audience.

But it's worked. Marvel and Disney have managed to generate buzz for the MCU that's been lacking for some time, and could be on course to do the impossible – pivot nearly a decade of missfires into one of 2026's biggest movies (and longest, Avenger's Doomsday is rumoured to be three hours long). Who'd have thought we'd need a comics scholar to anchor the frenzy, but Hibbett’s decode sounds the most obvious, and it’s exactly what you’d expect if you’ve ever watched a hundred movie trailers before a big reveal.