Status: Confirmed. Marvel has released its official Countdown to Doomsday viewing guide, and the most talked-about thing about it is how short the streaming portion is. The Avengers Doomsday watch list runs to 15 titles, and only one of them is a Disney Plus series: Loki. Everything else is a feature film, which tells you a lot about how Marvel wants audiences to prepare for December 18.
What is on the Avengers Doomsday watch list?
The full lineup covers X-Men, X2, Captain America: The First Avenger, The Avengers, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Captain America: Brave New World, Deadpool and Wolverine, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thunderbolts, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and Loki as the sole series.
Two things jump out immediately. First, the presence of the older 20th Century Fox X-Men films signals just how central the mutants and the multiverse are to Doom’s story, and it is a notable choice given those films sit outside the MCU proper. Second, the omission of WandaVision has fans reading tea leaves about whether Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch factors into Doomsday at all, given how heavily that series and Multiverse of Madness set up her arc.
Why does the list include only one Disney Plus show?
Loki earning the only series slot is not a surprise on its own, since the show established the multiverse, the Time Variance Authority and the branching-timeline mechanics that any Doom story has to operate inside. What is striking is everything left off. Ms. Marvel, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Secret Invasion, Echo and WandaVision are all absent, despite years of marketing insisting the shows and films formed one connected story.
Read generously, Marvel is being kind to casual viewers. A 15-title list is already a big ask, and adding six-hour series would push it past what anyone will realistically complete before December. Read less generously, it is a quiet admission that most of the Disney Plus slate is not load-bearing for the film. Either way, it lines up with the studio’s recent shift in television strategy, which our Marvel Television report covers in detail.
What the WandaVision omission means for Scarlet Witch
This is the detail that has travelled furthest. If Wanda Maximoff appeared in Doomsday, leaving out the series that explains her turn to villainy would be a strange call, since her arc is close to incomprehensible without it. The omission therefore reads as soft evidence she is not in the film, which fits Elizabeth Olsen’s own repeated comments downplaying a return.
That said, this is inference, not confirmation. Marvel has withheld far bigger names from marketing before, and a deliberate omission is exactly how you protect a surprise. Fans have also spotted Latverian witches in the D23 footage and built a theory that Wanda is hiding in plain sight. Treat the watch list as a signal, not a verdict.
How the watch list compares to Endgame’s rollout
It is worth measuring this against how Marvel handled the last Avengers finale. Before Avengers: Endgame the studio leaned on the full 21-film Infinity Saga as required context, and the marketing treated completism as a virtue. The Avengers Doomsday watch list does the opposite. It is curated rather than exhaustive, it skips entire phases, and it quietly concedes that a viewer can arrive at Doomsday without having seen most of what Marvel released between 2021 and 2025.
There is a small irony in it too. Joe Russo has repeatedly said Doomsday is “starting from scratch” and is not leaning on the past, yet the studio is now handing audiences a 15-title homework list. In practice the guide looks less like required reading and more like Marvel steering casual viewers toward three specific threads: the multiverse, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four. Everything on the list serves one of those, which is the clearest hint yet about the shape of Doom’s story.
What happens next
Expect Marvel to lean on this list through the autumn marketing push, likely bundling the titles into a Disney Plus collection with countdown branding as December nears. If a WandaVision addition quietly appears later, that would be a genuine tell. For now the takeaway is simple: Marvel thinks you need the films, one series, and two Fox X-Men movies. Avengers: Doomsday arrives December 18, 2026, and our Doomsday hub tracks every confirmed detail between now and then.
Sources: The Direct, Marvel Studios Countdown to Doomsday collection. Image: Marvel Studios.
About Post Author
