Over the past several weeks, there’s been as much discussion about the release of the first Avengers: Doomsday teasers as the teasers themselves. Fans have surely enjoyed seeing snippets from the highly anticipated Marvel Studios film, but they’ve also enjoyed debating the seemingly wild release, which saw the four trailers premiere in theaters and leak online before being made officially available.
And no matter where you stand on that, Marvel Studios is pleased with how it went down. io9 obtained a Marvel Studios breakdown of how the teasers did, and they read like nothing but a win.
The biggest stat is that the four teasers (and yes, Marvel internally refers to them as “teasers,” no matter what the Russo Brothers say) got over 1 billion views online. The majority of those came from Instagram, with over 500 million views, and TikTok, with over 100 million views. Both of those are records on those platforms for any Marvel trailer release ever, which speaks volumes for where viewers are seeing content these days.
Those numbers blow away the traditional platform for this kind of thing, YouTube, where the trailers have garnered about 60 million views and counting, total, across the four. (For context, in 2019, Avengers: Endgame got almost 300 million views on YouTube in a single day.)
And, of course, this is all with the film nearly a year away (meaning finished footage is less readily available), the teasers premiering in theaters as an attempt to give those audiences something special, and still not a single frame of the titular character, Dr. Doom, played by Robert Downey Jr. So there’s plenty more to come as we slowly approach the film’s December 18 release date.
Undoubtedly, regardless of numbers, the teasers got a conversation started. That was the point, and mission accomplished. You just have to wonder, why has there been such a huge emphasis on a movie that’s far away from release? Normally, a movie this big wouldn’t even need it. It’s the Avengers. You’d imagine people would be excited no matter what. Disney’s The Mandalorian and Grogu is out in four months, and we’ve only seen one trailer. Does it speak to Marvel attempting to reestablish the box office dominance it’s lost in the past few years?
Plus, could the rollout, which was complicated by lots and lots of leaks and bootlegs, have been even bigger if there had been a singular, awesome, traditional trailer? Would that have generated a billion views across all platforms? Could it have done more? Maybe the fact that this was so unusual and out of the box ended up working to its advantage. Or maybe it didn’t.
Ultimately, the answer to all of these questions will come down to whether Avengers: Doomsday can be as successful as the other Avengers movies before it. And, so far, it’s already done that by piquing our interest. 11 months and counting.
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