Photo Credit: Marvel Studios
MCU fans may have cracked a secret message hidden within the Avengers: Doomsday trailers.
Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Doomsday is currently in post-production. Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, also known as the Russo Brothers, the movie will be released in United States theaters at the end of this year. The sequel, Avengers: Secret Wars, then follows in 2027.
Marvel has now released four teaser trailers for Avengers: Doomsday. The first teaser revealed that Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers is returning to the MCU, while the second focused on Chris Hemsworth’s Thor and the third on a handful of X-Men characters. The fourth and most recent trailer then put a spotlight on Letitia Wright’s Black Panther/Shuri and Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm/The Thing, among others.
What might the Avengers: Doomsday trailers’ secret messages be?
On Instagram, the Russo Brothers recently shared a cryptic message saying there actually haven’t been any Avengers: Doomsday teaser trailers released as of yet; rather, the directors claim that the four videos are instead “clues.”
“What you’ve been watching for the last four weeks… are not teasers. Or trailers. They are stories. They are clues…Pay attention,” the post reads.
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While it’s hard to tell what, if anything, the Russos mean by this, some MCU fans think they’ve cracked the code. At the end of all four teasers, a countdown clock to the movie’s release date can be seen. Before that clock, however, there’s a brief look at a seemingly random assortment of letters and numbers. The first, Steve Rogers-focused teaser, for example, says 1e:24ber:02020.
Photo Credit: Marvel Studios
Some think that these are actually timestamps for Avengers: Endgame. The Steve Rogers code could theoretically be translated into 1 hour 24 minutes and 20 minutes; that moment in Avengers: Endgame is when Bruce Banner/Hulk is talking to the Ancient One, with the Ancient One notably saying “millions will suffer.”
While there’s some debate online regarding where, exactly, in Avengers: Endgame the other three codes land, one particularly convincing post on Reddit claims that the X-Men teaser points to an Endgame moment where Rocket Raccoon asks Thor if he’s crying. Deadpool & Wolverine, of course, has a moment where Wade Wilson sees Thor crying in the future, though there’s no clear indication as to why.
According to the same Reddit post, the Thor teaser leads to Loki, disguising himself as Captain America, saying he’s on his way down to coordinate search and rescue, while the fourth teaser’s code is Rocket Raccoon telling Ant-Man that he’ll take him to space. Again, there’s some disagreement, here, as a Twitter post citing the same theory says the fourth code is Hawkeye traveling to see his family.
This is all just a theory at this time. Avengers: Doomsday arrives on December 18, 2026, while Avengers: Secret Wars is dated for December 17, 2027.
