On Friday, some of very revealing concept art for a number of upcoming Marvel Studios projects found its way online via the official website of artist Mushk Rizvi. Most of the artwork spotlighted designs for The Fantastic Four: First Steps and what we assumed at the time was Avengers: Doomsday, but it seems quite a bit of it was actually for Secret Wars.
Scooper MTTSH believes that "most of the" concept art was for Secret Wars, namely the "Medieval" images featuring Hulk, She-Hulk and Skaar, the new Black Panther, and all shots of Doctor/Emperor Doom. There's a good chance artwork with Star-Lord, Wong and members of the Young Avengers was also from the 2027 movie.
This does make more sense when you think about it, since Doomsday is going to need to do a lot of heavy lifting to establish these new character dynamics and scenarios before we set off to Battleworld (if that is indeed the plan) in the follow-up film.
We're not sure if these designs will ultimately inform what we see on the screen, but considering the artwork was marked "Concept and Development Work (2022 - Early 2024)" on the site, we'd say there's a pretty good chance the characters will look at least similar to this when we meet them in the next Avengers movies.
Rizvi's site has since been scrubbed of these images, but there's some speculation that Marvel "leaked" the artwork themselves in order to build hype for the upcoming films and distract from Captain America: Brave New World's underperformance at the box office. We're not sure if we're buying it, but it wouldn't be the first time it happened!
Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theaters on May 1, 2026, followed by Avengers: Secret Wars on May 7, 2027. Both films will be directed by the Russo brothers, who also make their MCU return after helming Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
"Being able to create stories and explore characters within the Marvel Universe fulfilled a life-long dream of ours, and we discovered a powerful connection with audiences in each film that we made. We’re thrilled to collaborate once again with Kevin, Lou and the entire Marvel team to bring this epic adventure in storytelling to new and surprising places for both the fans and ourselves”, said The Russos in a statement after the SDCC panel.
Both movies are expected to shoot (almost) back-to-back, with production kicking off this April in the UK.