Give us your money. Give us more of it. Watch it in "Infinity Vision," whatever that means, five months before a single finished frame exists to justify the upcharge. There's a particular kind of corporate nakedness that never quite announces itself as desperation. It just accumulates, one decision at a time, until one day you're staring at a marketing campaign that's essentially become an open palm held out toward you, no longer even pretending to be anything else.
Every decision that has been made regarding Avengers: Doomsday has further added to the public display of anxiety and panic from Marvel Studios, and perhaps they still needed a perfect companion to this reheated soufflé. That is what Infinity Vision is, if you strip away the branding language.
Infinity Vision is not a format. It is not a camera system, not a projection standard, not anything you could point to and say "there, that's the technology." It is a marketing term invented, as far as anyone can tell, after their ploy to bully Dune 3 into ditching the release date that they already had in place for the last couple of years failed.
With IMAX locked into an exclusive deal with Dune 3 for three weeks, the execs at Disney were left to find new ways to make money off their fans, and of course, with little to no innovation possible. Hours, maybe days of thought probably went into this decision; they must have pondered and pondered, and there it was, they came up with the solution that they should just invent a premium tier out of nothing and ask audiences to pay extra for a marketing gimmick so that Marvel fans can watch this wonderful cinematic event filmed entirely on a sound stage in London on regular premium screens, as the Russo brothers had intended all along.
At this point, this entire movie feels like corporate soullessness with the mask fully off, and the strange part is how little effort has gone into keeping the mask on at all. Alan Cumming, who's in this film, actually said that he did not even know who he was supposed to be acting with the entire time he filmed Avengers: Doomsday.
"I did the entire film in isolation. Lots of green screen, face replacement. They even gave characters fake names. I don't know who I was acting with half the time," he revealed in an interview with Goldderby last year. "I broke the internet by mentioning something once, but honestly, I might have got it wrong."
Sit with that for a second. The same week Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is the #1 film in the world, Marvel wants you to buy the tickets for the complete antithesis of that. Give us your money, and we'll show you people (many of whom will meet each other for the first time during the marketing for this film) standing in rooms none of them actually stood in, rendered at a scale that makes the emptiness of it look, for two hours, like grandeur.
Some hardcore fans will tell you that the VFX isn't finished yet, sure, but I'd gently suggest that a $400 million movie from the biggest studio on the planet should not require its audience to pre-emptively write its excuses for it five months before release. Nor should they release a trailer this underbaked.
It didn't have to be this way, and the contrast within Marvel's own Spider-Man: Brand New Day is baffling. Tom Holland reportedly pushed to shoot Brand New Day on location, and it shows, in the most basic, unglamorous way possible: it looks like it is something real and it feels like someplace. Doomsday, by contrast, looks like MCU fakery from the ground up, washed-out digital backgrounds, costumes with the slightly stiff sheen of something that's never been outdoors, a film that doesn't appear to believe anyone involved in it ever actually stood in a real place while making it.
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It's strange to have to say this out loud about a studio that once flew a production crew to Nepal for Doctor Strange, that shut down actual airports for Civil War, but here we are, saying it. Even the first Pirates of the Caribbean, a two-decade-old Disney blockbuster, looks more physically alive than this, because at some point in the intervening years, somebody stopped believing the audience cared, and they stopped caring about giving you a product that feels anything other than subpar either.