Highlights from Marvel’s five-hour Avengers: Doomsday live broadcast revealed.

So… the X-Men are joining the Avengers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, apparently, though it remains to be seen exactly how. Marvel Studios went live at 11 a.m. EDT on Wednesday with a livestream on Instagram and YouTube that was eventually revealed as a casting announcement for 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday, the Russo brothers’ continuation of the MCU franchise. There were a lot of familiar names in the mix, but the biggest surprise was the return of Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, and several other familiar names from the 2000s’ X-Men movies.

The livestream opened on a canvas director’s chair with Chris Hemsworth’s name on it. The studio’s official account on X posted the stream with no context except the word “ANNOUNCEMENT” and the text “take a seat.” The stream ran for five and a half hours, with the camera panning to reveal further chairs bearing further familiar names at roughly 12-minute intervals, each one accompanied by a sting of theme music from a relevant Marvel movie. The stream ended at 4:30 p.m. EDT after revealing Robert Downey Jr. sitting in the final chair in a long row.

This initially mysterious slow-burn reveal laid out the initial key cast for Marvel Studios’ upcoming event movie Avengers: Doomsday, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom and as many Avengers and X-Men as Marvel can contract and cram on screen. Most notably missing: Tom Holland as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, any of the cast of Eternals or The Marvels, or Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr. Strange. (Though we already knew he likely won’t be in it — unless there’s a new reveal coming.) The ultra-slow pacing was reminiscent of HBO’s 2017 stunt reveal of the Game of Thrones season 7 premiere date, where more than 100,000 fans turned up to a livestream for more than an hour just to watch a large block of ice slowly melting to reveal the date.

Over the course of this extremely slow and teasing process, we saw chairs for the following actors:

Marvel fans reacting in chat and on social media were loudly curious about whether supposedly retired MCU players like Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson had been lured back into the game. (The latter was an extreme long-shot, given Johansson’s recent interview where she emphasized that her MCU character, Black Widow, is dead, and that Marvel fans should move on.)

But the real appeal in the stream and on social media was the raucous live-chat and run of memes, as Marvel fans with nothing to do but wait tried to out-funny each other in expressing their impatience for the stream to move on. Fan reaction was predictably split between excitement, frustration, interest, and vocal apathy, with something of a party atmosphere among people living in the chat.

Avengers: Doomsday is scheduled for release in 2026.