Popverse's top stories

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• 2026 is the year of 'Avengers: Really Bad Thing' in comics AND movies as Marvel’s flagship team gets a new focus

Whether it’s in comic books or on the big screen, Marvel is paying a lot of attention to the Avengers in 2026 — which might not be good news for the Avengers themselves. Fans, of course, are almost guaranteed to love it.

The most high profile Avengers event of the next 12 months is undoubtedly Avengers: Doomsday, which brings the Avengers back to the MCU (and back to the big screen) for the first time since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame — well, assuming that you don’t count this summer’s Thunderbolts*, AKA The New Avengers when Marvel wants to count the alternate title. The first and only Marvel Studios release of 2026 is sure to be one of the biggest movies of the year, even as it sets up what looks to be a storyline likely to result in death and destruction of multiple realities as Robert Downey Jr. enters proceedings as Doctor Doom and the Avengers are forced to evolve to deal with what is coming as a result of that. However, Doomsday isn’t the only existential challenge facing Marvel’s Mightiest Heroes in 2026.

In October, Marvel Comics started teasing what at the time was called Armageddon, promising that the series written by Chip Zdarsky “will impact the entire Marvel Universe, changing the face of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in a way not seen since Avengers: Disassembled, the event that redefined the team for the 21st century.” Since then, it’s been revealed that seeds for the storyline will be planted in a Wolverine miniseries launching in February 2026, as well as issues of Zdarsky’s current Captain America comic book series.

In the latest issue of his newsletter, Zdarsky dropped a new detail that clarified a little bit more about what fans should expect, writing that the upcoming Comics Giveaway Day Armageddon/X-Men special issue is “going to be really cool and will set the stage for AVENGERS: ARMAGEDDON this summer.” This looks to be the first confirmation that the event is specifically an Avengers-centric storyline, as well as the first-ever public use of what looks to be the final title for the event itself. ('Armageddon' is less easy to trademark as a title than 'Avengers: Armageddon,' after all.)

Apparently, 2026 is going to be a year of projects called ‘Avengers: [Word Meaning Something Very Very Bad]’ — which almost certainly guarantees hard times for the heroes themselves on the page and on screen, but also a renewed focus on the Avengers as a concept and a property across all of Marvel moving forward. You’ll thank us when it’s all over, heroes. We hope.

Keep up to date on Popverse's Marvel coverage, with these highlights:

• The MCU needs Anya Taylor-Joy's Magik in it (and not just for the X-Men connection)
• How Disney+'s What If...? is the moonshot for the next 50 years of Marvel Studios & the MCU
• Marvel Studios has accidentally created a new Phase that predates Phases 1 - 6: the MCU Phase Zero
• Overgrown children of the atom: Marvel's X-Men can't evolve past their '90s commercial peak
• The biggest outstanding questions of the Marvel Studios' movies & TV shows
• Donald Trump is the landlord for Marvel's House of Ideas
• Marvel Studios swapping out Doctor Doom for Kang offers the chance to jettison the Multiverse Saga
• What Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige is saying (and not saying) about the MCU X-Men franchise says a lot about the future of the Mutant Saga
• If Marvel is going to bring Loki back for Secret Wars, it's time to give him an upgrade
• In 2021, Sony's boss said people won't miss Spider-Man in its Spider-adjacent movie. Turns out, they do.