Where Avengers: Doomsday Should Land on the MCU Tier List

Avengers: Doomsday hits theaters December 18, and the discourse has already started eating itself. Half the internet thinks this is the movie that gets the MCU back on track. The other half thinks Marvel is just rearranging deck chairs with a bigger cast list. Both things can't be true, but that's never stopped a good tier list argument.

We just put together MCU Movies Ranked: Every Marvel Film From Best to Worst, running all the way from the first Iron Man to whatever Marvel dropped last month. Doomsday isn't on it yet, because it isn't out yet. But that hasn't stopped fans from mentally slotting it in before a single ticket sells. So let's talk about where it's actually likely to land, and why the range of outcomes here is wider than almost any Marvel movie in years.

The case for S-tier

The pitch for Doomsday is basically "remember how good Endgame felt?" A massive ensemble cast, a villain built up across multiple projects, and the sense that the MCU is finally paying off threads instead of just planting new ones. If the movie sticks the landing the way Endgame did, it could genuinely crack the top of our rankings next to the first two Avengers team-ups and Infinity War.

The ingredients are there. Big crossover event movies tend to overperform expectations when Marvel actually commits to consequences instead of resetting everything by the credits. If Doomsday kills off characters, closes arcs, and doesn't chicken out with a mid-credits "just kidding," that's the kind of thing that ages well on a tier list.

The case for it sinking like a stone

Here's the other side. The post-Endgame era has been rough. Too many Marvel movies in the last few years landed somewhere between forgettable and actively frustrating, and a chunk of the fanbase has checked out entirely. Throwing a huge cast at a movie doesn't automatically make it good, it can just as easily make it feel cluttered and rushed, with nobody getting a real arc because there are twelve people who need a moment.

There's also the villain problem. Big bad guys in crossover movies live or die by whether they feel like a real threat or just a CGI punching bag with a cool entrance. If Doomsday's antagonist doesn't land, no amount of returning cameos will save it from middle-of-the-pack purgatory, or worse.

What actually decides it

A few things will determine where this movie ends up when we update our full ranking:

• Whether the stakes feel real or get undone immediately
• If the massive cast gets actual character work instead of just screen time
• Whether the villain is scary or just loud
• Pacing, because three hours of setup with twenty minutes of payoff is a real risk here
• How it holds up on rewatch once the hype dies down

That last one matters more than people admit. Plenty of Marvel movies played great opening weekend and then quietly slid down everyone's personal rankings a year later once the shine wore off. We're not grading this thing off one trailer reaction or a loud opening night. Real tier placement takes time.

Where we'd guess it lands today

If we had to bet before seeing it: Doomsday probably lands in the upper-middle tier at worst, just on scale and ambition alone, and has a real shot at top-tier if the script doesn't buckle under its own cast size. The ceiling is as high as any MCU movie gets. The floor is "fun but bloated," which honestly describes a few too many recent Marvel entries already.

The honest answer is nobody knows yet, not critics, not fans, not us. Anyone telling you definitively where this movie ranks before release is guessing, same as we are. What we do know is that it's going to move the needle on the whole list one way or another, because an event this size doesn't just slot in quietly.

Once it's out, we'll update the full rankings and give it a real spot instead of a prediction. Until then, go argue about it, that's half the fun of a franchise this big. And if you've got your own order for how the MCU should stack up, build your own ranking and see if it survives contact with the comments section.