Marvel spent the week playing on the biggest stage it could find, DC laid out its 2027 plans, and the box office got a reminder that a video game adaptation can still open a weekend.
The headline belongs to baseball. During Game 1 of the World Series on Friday night, with the Tampa Bay Rays visiting the Milwaukee Brewers on FOX, Marvel dropped a new one-minute look at Avengers: Doomsday, and it is the most fun piece of marketing the movie has done yet. The footage opens on Ebbets Field on Earth-828, the Fantastic Four’s home world, where the Brooklyn Dodgers’ old ballpark is still standing and still packed. Reed Richards, in a blue 4 uniform and a Brooklyn cap, takes the mound to throw the first pitch to Johnny Storm, with the Thing in a Brooklyn cap of his own and fans in the stands waving a sign that reads “Four Heroes, One Historic Field.” Real major leaguers show up alongside them, with Bryce Harper, Freddie Freeman, Randy Arozarena, Junior Caminero, and Brewers Game 1 starter Jacob Misiorowski watching from the dugout rail in their own uniforms. The Avengers get their moments too, including Ant-Man caught between Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson in his Captain America suit, unsure which one to address by the title, and Thor calling down lightning before the footage cuts to Doctor Doom in his mask and hood. It is a clever bit of staging: the biggest movie of the year borrowing the biggest live audience of the week, with less than two months to go before December 18.
Doomsday also picked up a casting story worth watching. The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that Sandra Hüller, the Oscar-nominated star of Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, has joined the film in a cameo role, after her name surfaced on the British Stunt Register a couple of weeks ago. Marvel declined to comment, and the role itself is secret, but the speculation has a clear shape. Marvel has been teasing Doom’s mystical corner all year, from color-coded Latverian robes on display at San Diego Comic-Con to a poster unveiled at Comic-Con Málaga on October 3 showing Doom before three masked figures under the tagline “Witching season has arrived.” The leading theories have Hüller playing Cynthia von Doom, Victor’s mother, a Romani sorceress whose death is the defining event of his life in the comics, or one of the hooded Latverian Witches. A stunt listing linking her with two lesser-known actresses points toward the three of them being the three witches, which would also rule out the fan theories that the witches are Scarlet Witch, Clea, or Sylvie in disguise. Nothing is confirmed, but casting an actress of Hüller’s caliber, even briefly, tells you Doom’s Latverian backstory is a real thread in the film rather than set dressing.
Elsewhere at Marvel, Spider-Man: Brand New Day keeps rewriting the record books. The film is now at roughly $2.516 billion worldwide, making it the third-highest-grossing movie of all time behind only Avatar and Avengers: Endgame, and it just topped the iTunes download chart after its digital debut. A Blu-ray and DVD release follows on December 15, and Sony has plans for a theatrical re-release with additional footage, including a restored scene featuring Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple. And on the small screen, VisionQuest premiered on Disney+ on October 14, picking up the White Vision thread fans have been waiting on since WandaVision.
DC had a full week of its own. The publisher announced Green Lantern: Doomed Cosmos on October 20, an Elseworlds miniseries from writer Dan Watters and artist Kyle Hotz that reimagines the Green Lantern Corps as hulking, armored warriors fighting a cosmic war, a look that has drawn immediate comparisons to Warhammer 40,000’s Space Marines. Then on October 21, the anniversary of Wonder Woman’s DC debut, DC declared 2027 the “Year of Wonder,” promising a year of stories for Diana that begins on January 20 with Wonder Woman #41, where Louise Simonson takes over the flagship series for a four-issue arc meant to establish a bold new status quo. On the stands this coming Wednesday, Batman: Bad Seeds comes to its oversized finale with Sunrise #1, as Batman and his allies race to stop Poison Ivy’s attack, which turned Gotham into a prehistoric nightmare, before the first light of dawn. And in theaters, Clayface opened on Friday, with Mike Flanagan’s script earning it early praise as the scariest movie ever made from a DC property. It is a standalone origin story with no familiar heroes, its Gotham setting the only thing tying it to the wider DC universe, which makes it an interesting test of whether DC Studios can sell a genre one-off alongside its larger plans.
At the box office, Street Fighter won last weekend with $31 million domestic and $51.1 million worldwide, opening in 3,575 theaters. The win capped a healthy weekend overall, with the domestic market at roughly $101.6 million, up about 45 percent over the same weekend last year, and year-to-date ticket sales near $8.2 billion, almost 20 percent ahead of 2025. This weekend’s numbers, including Clayface’s opening, will not be in until Sunday.
That is the week. Doomsday is eight weeks out, Wonder Woman’s big year is mapped, and the box office is heading into the holidays with real momentum. See you next Saturday.