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Marvel continues to be in an incredibly strange place with Doomsday, notes Alasdair Stuart. We’ve known the movie is coming for months, we’ve known the work it must do, the incredibly large cast it has and that it will be the first part of a two part story finished in a year with Secret Wars. All of this, four years ago, hell two years ago, would have been cause for excitement.

And yet the overwhelming feeling I see for Doomsday is annoyance. Part of it’s the ponderous and deeply annoying teaser trailer campaign. Part of it’s the endless AI slop do-overs of trailers a few thousand people at trade conventions have seen. Part of it’s the unforced errors and arrogance that led to a Latverian coffee shop ‘reveal’ at SXSW London, the incomprehensibly muddled news about the Endgame rerelease and the bizarre announcement of Infinity Vision, a format which they seem to be defining on the fly, as well as hurried statements about how they’re aware they need to win people back even as they make choices which alienate people more.

A lot of it, for me anyway, is one-part occupational PTSD and one part pre-emptive annoyance. I’m a former comic retailer and nothing was ever more tiresome than a vast unwieldy crossover. Add in the suspicion that this is going to take a lot of the MCU’s best, and least well served, characters off the board and this feels like a two-year run up to a two-year housecleaning exercise we’re expected to be excited about.  It feels, even now, very unlikely it’s going to work and that bolts onto the weird reticence to let us see any of the bloody thing to create a perpetual motion machine of ‘OH COME ON!’. One not helped by news like Marvel laying off most of the MCU art team right before releasing a badly executed and generic poster and treating it like it was news we should get excited about.

They have a Lot of work to do, and not a tremendous amount of time to do it in. They seem to be finally kicking off later this month when Marvel return to Hall H at the San Diego Comic Con for what’s widely expected to be the world premiere of the first actual look at Doomsday. Maybe it’s even one people who aren’t there will get to see.

I know, I know. I don’t like being like this! I love (most) of these movies! I’m Mr Chipper! And yet here we are. Anyway, there is, buried under all of this endless waiting, some news. In addition to Infinity Vision tickets going on sale (FIGHT THE PRESSURE HEADACHE, ALASDAIR, FIGHT IT!) we also have a running time for the movie.  It’s not quite locked, but right now Doomsday clocks in at 165 minutes. That puts it longer than Infinity War but shorter than Endgame.

Honestly? Good. The movie has a ridiculous amount of work to do and a run time like that makes a lot of sense. Honestly, go longer if you have to, take the time you need because you NEED the time. It’s the first piece of news in a while that’s simply made me tired instead of annoyed about Doomsday and maybe, the corner is turning. Hopefully we’ll find out later this month after SDCC.