What might happen
Will the Avengers die in Doomsday?
Will the Avengers die in Avengers: Doomsday? A grounded look at which heroes are most at risk, why Marvel kills characters before a saga finale, and what the multiverse changes.
Yes - this is a changing-of-the-guard movie, and those come with a body count. The old guard is being cleared to make room for the X-Men and Fantastic Four era, so a couple of big names likely fall.
Here’s the quiet truth every long-time Marvel fan already feels in their gut walking into this one: Avengers: Doomsday is where you say goodbye to people. Not all of them. But some. This is a generational hand-off dressed up as a war movie, and Marvel has never once pulled off a hand-off without funerals.
The team has always been a graveyard
The Avengers, as a concept, have always been a revolving door with a body count. Look back across the Infinity Saga and the roster reads like a memorial: Quicksilver throwing himself in front of a hail of bullets in Age of Ultron; Vision and Gamora both dying in Infinity War; and then the double gut-punch of Endgame - Natasha Romanoff falling on Vormir so her best friend could live, and Tony Stark burning himself out to save all of existence. Marvel earned its reputation for real stakes the hard way: by actually killing people you loved, and by refusing to bring most of them back. Every time the team reassembles, it’s a slightly different team, because that churn is the engine the whole franchise runs on. Heroes rise, heroes fall, the torch keeps moving. Doomsday is simply the biggest, most deliberate turn of that wheel yet.
The old era is being retired
Look at where the founding roster actually stands now. Iron Man is dead. Black Widow is dead. Captain America handed off his shield and vanished into the past to grow old. Thor drifted away with the Guardians and then out of frame. The Hulk is semi-retired. The team that first assembled against Loki in 2012 is, functionally, gone. What’s rushing in to replace it is an entirely new spine - the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Sam Wilson’s Captain America, Shang-Chi, and a bench of younger heroes waiting in the wings.
When a franchise swaps out its entire foundation this completely, the changeover needs weight. And nothing in this genre carries weight like a death. That is the real reason Doom is here. He isn’t merely a villain to be punched; he’s the storm the story needs to thin the ranks so the next generation can inherit a battlefield of their own.
Reading the geometry
So who’s on the block? The narrative shape tells you plenty:
- Expect at least one torch-passing death - a beloved veteran falling so that a successor is forced to step up and carry the name. It’s Marvel’s oldest and most reliable emotional move.
- Expect the visiting legacy heroes to be the most exposed. The classic X-Men and an older, retired Steve Rogers are on loan from realities that are actively collapsing; a story about dying universes has a built-in, almost guilt-free way to say goodbye to them.
- Don’t expect the new leads to fall. Marvel has just spent years building Sam, Shang-Chi and the Fantastic Four - killing them here would be setting fire to its own future.
It’s worth thinking about what these deaths are actually for. Marvel isn’t killing heroes to be cruel; it’s clearing shelf space. The Multiverse Saga has quietly grown unwieldy - too many characters, too many timelines, too many threads to service. A finale that thins the herd isn’t just emotionally satisfying, it’s practically necessary: it lets the studio stride into its next era lighter, with a focused roster built around the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and a clear new generation of leads. Seen that way, Doomsday’s losses aren’t only tragedies - they’re the studio drawing a line under a decade and deciding, deliberately, what it carries forward and what it lays to rest. And that’s why the emotional deaths matter more than the raw number: a single perfectly-placed sacrifice - a hero choosing to fall so the others can live - does more to launch a new era than a dozen anonymous ones.
The one comfort
There is a real reason to hold onto hope. This is a multiverse story riddled with variants and incursions, which means “dead” is negotiable. A hero can fall in Doomsday and be rewritten, restored, or replaced when reality itself is rebuilt in Secret Wars the following year. So brace for loss - but don’t assume every loss is carved in stone.
Whatever the final tally, expect Marvel to earn every tear it wrings out of you. The studio has always been at its most effective when it lets loss actually mean something, and a generational hand-off is hollow without a real goodbye. Doomsday will almost certainly give at least one beloved veteran the send-off their story has been quietly building toward for years - and it will make sure you feel every second of it.
Our call: likely. Not a team wipe - a deliberate, emotional pruning that turns the page on the Avengers as you’ve known them for over a decade. Expect to be moved, and expect at least one goodbye to genuinely hurt. For exactly who’s most at risk, see who dies; for the likely body count, how many heroes will die.