Yesterday evening, the news broke that Chris Evans has signed up to star in Avengers: Doomsday. With the Multiverse in play and the events of Avengers: Endgame and Deadpool & Wolverine still fresh in all our minds, we can't say with any real certainty who the actor will suit up as.
There have long been rumblings about a Multiversal Masters of Evil in the next Avengers movie and scooper @MyTimeToShineH has taken to X to strongly hint that Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom and Evans' character could team up as part of an "Evil Avengers."
Could we see Doom enlist more villainous Variants to help his cause? If so, we'd imagine Captain HYDRA is a very real possibility for Evans.
Adding further fuel to the fire, The Cosmic Circus' Alex Perez shared the cover of 2017's Avengers #6, a key chapter in the build-up to Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic's Secret Wars.
Apparently, that was pinned on a drawing board in Marvel Studios when we were still getting Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. It shows the original Avengers being pitted against a new team, a hint perhaps at what's to come in the MCU a couple of years from now.
In related news, Variety caught up with Doctor Strange actor Benedict Cumberbatch at the Red Sea Film Festival and learned more about his excitement to return as the former Sorcerer Supreme in Avengers: Doomsday.
Calling the character a "complex man motivated by a need to control everything at any cost," the actor added, "I am interested in seeing where these costs take him. There is a lot more to play and it’s very exciting."
That was it for future talk, but Cumberbatch did reflect on what his MCU experience has been like thus far. "When they are really good, they capture the zeitgeist, speak to us and our culture. They are so much fun to do."
"[Marvel] will do a lot of location. They do a lot of real set builds and there’s a lot of 360 stuff to work with, despite a lot of [moments] where you go, 'I need to step outside because all I’ve seen is green and blue all day,'" he added before revealing he learned "how to have fun" by observing Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Holland's interactions on the set of Avengers: Infinity War.
Looking back at his role in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Cumberbatch added, "Watching Tom Holland off the success of the first ‘Spider-Man’ film was magic. I [realized] I gotta have fun. I can’t just turn up with the collar."
"The best stuff on those huge canvases, those things with a huge amount of responsibility and expectation from all these amazing, devoted fans, is to play and have fun and be free to keep it alive. [Otherwise] it becomes stale," he concluded.
And, in one final MCU update, a new look at Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes on the set of Thunderbolts* has surfaced on social media today. It doesn't show much, but we'd figured you'd still like to check it out.