With the release of the first Teaser Trailer online on the day before Christmas Eve, the Marvel Studios team have confirmed that Chris Evans will be returning as Steve Rogers in next year’s Avengers: Doomsday, giving many MCU fans a very Merry Christmas! Evans has not appeared in an MCU film as Rogers since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame; remembered by many MCU fans now as the “good old days.”
The Teaser only takes a little more than a minute to watch. It boasts no dialogue; just the slow and melodic sounds of the familiar Avengers theme that we all know and love. The visuals see a man riding and then parking a motorcycle and then walking into his house where he briefly accesses a Captain America uniform and then picks up an infant. The camera pans up and shows Evans’ face as he smiles lovingly at the child that he holds.
We then get text that says “Steve Rogers will return in Avengers: Doomsday” followed by an ominous Countdown to Doomsday clock.
The home that Rogers enters appears to be the same house that we last saw him arrive to at the end of Endgame where he traveled back in time to get the life that he never had with his beloved Peggy Carter (portrayed by Hayley Atwell). The last shot of Doomsday is actually Steve getting the long-awaited dance with Peggy that he had longed for, in what was a beautiful end to a magnificent film and seemingly to the arc of one of the MCU’s most beloved characters. That may no longer be the case, however.
In Avengers: Endgame, prior to his reunion with Peggy, we saw Steve venture on a mission through time (if not the Multiverse, or some actively Branching version of it) to return the Infinity Stones to the times and places from which they were taken. He did this is an effort to “clip all the branches” that The Avengers’ Time Heist threatened the stability of the Sacred Timeline with. This was before we learned anything about Kang and the Sacred Timeline and the Multiversal War and He Who Remains, etc in the Loki series on Disney+; a series that really didn’t do anything at all to address what exactly became of Steve’s very important mission other than to say “What The Avengers did was supposed to happen.” That fact had left MCU fans wondering / debating what really happened between the moment Steve disappeared from the Time Platform and then reappeared as an elderly man sitting by the lake on a bench waiting to pass his iconic shield and the mantle of Captain America with it, on to his dear friend Sam Wilson.
There are two lingering theories, and up to this point, the writers (Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) and the directors (Joe Russo and Anthony Russo) of Endgame have never publicly agreed on the answer. Markus and McFeely have stated that Steve landed on the MCU 616-Timeline / within the MCU 616-Universe. He literally went back to the past (the MCU’s past) and reunited with his Peggy and then lived in the background of the MCU from 1940-something until he returned as an old man to give Sam the shield. Some theorists have even suggested that Rogers’ doing this is what created the first Incursion in the MCU; an end-of-days scenario that we first learned about in 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and that Avengers: Doomsday is said to revolve around.
On the other hand, the Russo Brothers have insisted that Steve created a Branched Timeline when he went to live out his life with Peggy. When he arrived in the past, the Universe initiated a sort of copy / paste function that served as the birth of a new Universe. Steve still had all of his memories: falling in love with Peggy, becoming Captain America, going into the ice, coming out of the ice, becoming an Avenger, fighting Loki, learning Bucky was still alive, fighting Ultron, the Avengers Civil War, fighting Thanos, the Snap, killing Thanos, the Time Heist … all of it. Steve has his memories and the 1940’s world he has created is everything that the world was as he experienced it up until the moment he arrived in the past from the future, at which point, it is now free to evolve into something entirely new. Steve can essentially marry Peggy, have children, squash Hydra out from infesting S.H.I.E.L.D. before it grows, find Bucky sooner, form The Avengers sooner, etc. The possibilities are limitless for what this new world could become … And, as the Trailer shows, Steve did make significant changes to this new world. He married Peggy (he is wearing a wedding ring in the Teaser) and they had a child. BIG changes, indeed.
One way or another, it looks like we are finally going to get the answers to these questions in Doomsday, and I applaud Marvel Studios for that. This is something that I’ve wanted for six-years and counting!
The return of Chris Evans as Steve Rogers is also something I’ve been wanting for six-years and counting! It was wonderful to see Evans reprise his role as Johnny Storm from the old 2000’s Fantastic Four films in Deadpool and Wolverine; I was a very big fan of his cameo, but Chris Evans IS Steve Rogers. It’s the role that he was born to play, and Evans’ Rogers is one of my most favorite MCU characters. I cannot wait to see him wield the shield again!
Avengers: Doomsday will arrive in theaters on December 18, 2026. Chris Evans joins an already-announced cast that includes Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes), Letitia Wright (Shuri), Paul Rudd (Scott Lang), Wyatt Russell (John Walker), Tenoch Huerta (Namor), Simu Liu (Shang-Chi), Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova), Lewis Pullman (Bob Reynolds), Danny Ramirez (Joaquin Torres), David Harbour (Alexei Shostakov), Winston Duke (M’Baku), Hannah John-Kamen (Ava Starr), and Tom Hiddleston (Loki), along with Vanessa Kirby (Susan Storm), Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm), Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm), and Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards), and X-Men film franchise veterans Kelsey Grammer (Beast), Patrick Stewart (Professor X), Ian McKellen (Magneto), Alan Cumming (Nightcrawler), Rebecca Romijn (Mystique), James Marsden (Cyclops), and Channing Tatum (Gambit), and of course, the returning Robert Downey Jr (Doctor Doom).
Avengers: Doomsday will mark Chris Evans’ 11th MCU appearance as Steve Rogers: Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), The Avengers (2012), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Captain Marvel (2019), and Avengers: Endgame (2019). It will be his 12th MCU film overall when counting 2024’s Deadpool and Wolverine and his 14th overall Marvel Studios production when counting 2005’s Fantastic Four and 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
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