In July 2022, Marvel Studios returned in person to San Diego Comic-Con with the force of a thousand Thanos snaps. After going virtual for two years, the annual gathering for all things geeky was back, and Marvel didn’t hold back. Studio boss Kevin Feige commanded the stage for an hour-long presentation full of major announcements, including the reveal of two new Avengers movies to cap off the newly christened "Multiverse Saga." Feige also announced plans for new movies about Ant-Man, Captain America, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and more

I remember covering the news from the Comic-Con press room nearby (tickets to Marvel's panel are infamously hard to come by, and we could only get one person into Hall H). The roars of the crowd sometimes got so loud I could hear them through the walls. After the event was over and the crowd had cleared, I headed downstairs and walked into that same room to watch Kevin Smith take the stage for his own, much chiller panel.

"Life is worth living again," Smith said with a smile to kick things off. Clearly, he had been following along with the Marvel news, too.

Four years later, Marvel returned to Comic-Con's Hall H once again to promote and reveal its upcoming slate. With that long-delayed and since renamed Avengers movie finally releasing later this year, the focus was almost entirely on Doomsday, though a pair of other announcements for a Ghostrider flick starring Ryan Gosling and a third Black Panther entry were there to pad out the hour.

I wasn't there afterward to see how Kevin Smith responded to the news this time, but based on the overall online response, it sure seems like Marvel fans aren't as hyped for the MCU’s future in 2026 as they were back in 2022.

On social media, the response has been swift and brutal. From the news that Shawn Levy (Free Guy, Deadpool & Wolverine) would be helming another Marvel movie to the fact that Ryan Coogler's first movie post-Sinners is a return to the MCU rather than another genre-breaking original idea, the internet seems personally insulted by everything Marvel just announced. (Rationally, neither of these comes as a huge surprise, but who's ever been rational on Twitter.) Meanwhile, Kevin Feige's claim that Avengers: Doomsday will be fine because the MCU never bothered to build up Thanos that much anyway has been thoroughly debunked by roughly a million quote tweets.

Social media is a bubble, of course, but how else can you tell whether Marvel fans are impressed? We could sit around and wait for Avengers: Doomsday to actually come out, but that's a long time to wait. In the meantime, you might assume that after gorging on MCU announcements over the weekend, fans would similarly gorge on their favorite Marvel movies on Disney Plus, but as it turns out, that's not the case either.

A quick look at FlixPatrol, the third-party streaming service tracker, reveals that as of July 27, the Disney Plus streaming charts are still being dominated by Avatar, Moana, and Spider-Man. Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame managed to squeeze their way onto the bottom of the list on the backs of Hall H fanfare. Disney's own official top 10 ranking paints a similar picture, with just Infinity War as the only non-Spidey Marvel movie to make the cut.

On the one hand, it makes sense that Marvel fans are more focused on Spider-Man than the rest of the MCU at the moment. Spider-Man: Brand New Day comes out this week, so it's officially crunch time for anyone hoping to revisit that franchise. But I'm still surprised that nothing else is charting in response to all this news. Marvel spent the last six years exploring the concept of the multiverse that's so core to Doomsday, so you might think a movie like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness would suddenly be of interest. It seems like even the news of a new Prince T'Challah wasn't enough to drive a spike in viewers to the last two Black Panther films, either.

Of course, it's far too early to make any claims that Avengers: Doomsday is doomed, or that the MCU at large is beyond redemption. Doomsday will likely make $1 billion at the box office by inertia alone, and it's totally possible that Ghost Rider, Black Panther 3, and the upcoming X-Men movie all wind up being awesome superhero flicks that revive the franchise.

Still, if all the Comic-Con hype in the world couldn't translate to a bit of online goodwill or an uptick in viewership on Disney Plus, the idea of just “more Marvel” inspires little hope in a revival of the MCU's glory days.