Avengers: Doomsday assumes eight pieces of homework, and only four of them actually matter. The rest can wait, or be skipped entirely.

The four essentials live in The Marvels, VisionQuest, Ms. Marvel and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The four that can sit unwatched are She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Agatha All Along, Secret Invasion and Morbius. Doomsday opens Dec. 18, the same day as Dune: Part Three, with the Russo brothers directing Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom in a film that pulls together three separate universes.

Spoiler Warning

This spoils the endings and post-credits scenes of The Marvels, Ms. Marvel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, She-Hulk, Agatha All Along, Secret Invasion, Morbius and the VisionQuest finale.

The four Doomsday actually needs, ranked by how likely they are to come up

  1. The X-Men’s universe is real, and an Avenger is trapped inside it. Essential. The Marvels ends with Monica Rambeau waking up in a hospital bed on the wrong side of a dimensional tear, greeted by a variant of her own mother and by Kelsey Grammer’s Beast, who reports to “Charles,” all scored with music lifted from X2 and Days of Future Past. That scene is the hinge Doomsday swings on: the film sets Earth-616 alongside the Fantastic Four’s Earth-828 and the X-Men’s Earth-10005, with Grammer joined by Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Alan Cumming and Rebecca Romijn. Stewart died at his home in Los Angeles on Oct. 28, 2026, at 86. The movie that set this up grossed just $206.1 million worldwide on a $270 million production budget), which makes it the most-skipped load-bearing film in the lineup.

Even the actress on screen didn’t know what she was filming. Teyonah Parris told Nerdist, “When we filmed it, it was an actor who was very kind, very nice, and he was dressed in a lab coat. He looked like a normal, regular doctor. No one said, ‘By the way, this is going to be a little surprise.’ I had zero clue. I found out with everyone else.”

  1. Wanda Maximoff is alive, and Doom brought her back. Essential. VisionQuest closes with Vision, Tommy and Billy reunited and Wanda still missing, then the post-credits scene shows Doctor Doom resurrecting her after Multiverse of Madness buried her under a mountain. Elizabeth Olsen said in 2025 she would not be joining the Doomsday cast, and she’s absent from the announced lineup. Treat the scene as the setup Marvel keeps on file, not a guarantee of screen time.

  2. Kamala Khan is a mutant. Essential. The Ms. Marvel finale hands Bruno the line that rewired the franchise: “Kamala, there’s something different in your genes. Like, a mutation,” delivered under a cue from the 1990s X-Men cartoon. That made her the MCU’s first confirmed mutant.

  3. Mutants already live on Earth-616, and one is in the cast. Essential. Namor calls himself a mutant in Wakanda Forever, and Tenoch Huerta Mejía is on Doomsday’s announced roster. By the time the X-Men arrive from another universe, the question of whether mutants exist on this one has already been answered.

The four threads Doomsday can leave hanging

  1. Bruce Banner has a son. Skippable. She-Hulk’s finale ends at the Walters family cookout with Bruce introducing Skaar, played by Wil Deusner. Nothing has mentioned him since, not even Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

  2. Death is a person. Skippable. Agatha All Along revealed Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal as the MCU’s Death, with the line “All roads lead to me.” Plaza isn’t on the Doomsday cast list, which reads like an idea parked for later rather than paid off now.

  3. Rhodey was a Skrull. Skippable. Secret Invasion’s finale frees the real James Rhodes without ever saying how long the impostor had been running his life. War Machine isn’t announced for Doomsday, so the film appears to have stepped over the whole question.

  4. The Vulture is stranded in Sony’s universe. Skippable. Morbius drops Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes into Sony’s Spider-Man reality, later numbered Earth-688. Morbius made $73.87 million domestic, less than The Marvels. Nobody is in a hurry to collect that thread.

Why any of this homework matters now

The reason the eight-item checklist suddenly feels worth doing is scale. Spider-Man: Brand New Day passed $936.773 million domestic after 47 days, the biggest unadjusted North American release ever, on the back of a record $360 million opening weekend and a $2.45 billion global total, third all time.

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Doomsday is chasing that same audience. The film had cleared $50 million in presales with three months still to go, more than 70% of it premium large-format seats. That’s not a crowd buying tickets out of habit. That’s a crowd buying tickets expecting payoff, which is exactly why the four essential items on this list are worth the time and the four skippable ones aren’t.

The one project to watch before Dec. 18

VisionQuest, the eight-episode Disney+ series that just wrapped, is the shortest route to being ready and the only project on this list with Doom actually in the frame. Availability checked Nov. 13, 2026.

It also does something the other seven don’t: it hands a character everyone assumed was finished a future, with a villain already attached to it.