Are Marvel's New Heroes Being Sidelined? We Tested The Complaint Against The Actual Cast List

The complaint that Marvel is sidelining its new heroes in favour of legacy stars is one of the loudest in the fandom right now, and when you test it against the confirmed Avengers: Doomsday cast list, it is mostly wrong. Simu Liu, Anthony Mackie, Florence Pugh, Lewis Pullman, Letitia Wright and the entire Thunderbolts ensemble are all confirmed. That is not a bench being ignored. Where the complaint does hold - and it holds hard - is above the cast list: in billing, in solo-film greenlights, and in who the marketing puts on the poster.

So the honest answer is a split decision. Let us show the working.

The Complaint, Stated Properly

Steelmanned rather than strawmanned, the argument goes like this: Marvel spent Phases 4 and 5 introducing a new generation - Shang-Chi, Yelena, Sam Wilson's Captain America, Shuri, Kate Bishop, Ms. Marvel, Riri Williams, the Eternals, Sentry - and then, at the first sign of commercial trouble, reached back for Robert Downey Jr., the Fox X-Men and Chris Evans instead of trusting what it built. On this reading, the new bench exists to fill frames while the old guard carries the story.

It is a real pattern-recognition claim, not a tantrum. It also has an emotional engine behind it that is worth naming: people who invested in Yelena Belova or Kamala Khan across a series and a film do not want to watch them stand at the back of a group shot while a 2003 X-Men actor gets the hero beat. That is a reasonable thing to be worried about. And parts of the complaint are simply correct.

The Test: Who Is Actually Confirmed

Here is the thing about arguments over cast lists: cast lists are public. So we checked.

The post-Endgame generation on the Doomsday list

• Anthony Mackie - the current Captain America, and not a cameo-scale name in this franchise
• Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, arguably Marvel's most successful new lead of the last five years
• Simu Liu as Shang-Chi, back in an Avengers film after one solo outing
• Letitia Wright as Shuri, carrying the Black Panther mantle
• Lewis Pullman as Sentry, straight out of Thunderbolts
• David Harbour and the wider Thunderbolts roster
• The Fantastic Four: First Steps cast - Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn - who are new to the MCU by definition
• Tenoch Huerta as Namor, introduced in 2022

The legacy contingent, for comparison

Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Sebastian Stan, and six Fox-era X-Men actors, plus Channing Tatum's long-delayed Gambit. That is a substantial block, and its cultural weight is obviously higher per name. But by headcount the newer generation is not outnumbered - it is arguably the larger half of the film, and that is before you count the Thunderbolts supporting bench.

Which means the strong form of the complaint - that Marvel has quietly dropped the characters it spent five years introducing - simply does not survive contact with the announcement. If you want to argue this properly, you have to argue about prominence rather than presence, and prominence is a much harder thing to prove before a film exists.

Where The Complaint Is Wrong

Three specific places.

1. Headcount. If Marvel wanted an all-legacy nostalgia film, it had the option. It did not take it. The Thunderbolts ensemble arriving essentially intact is the opposite of sidelining.
2. Continuity of investment. Shang-Chi, Shuri and Sam Wilson could have quietly disappeared after underperforming or divisive films. They did not. Marvel is still paying to keep them on screen.
3. The Fantastic Four block. The most heavily promoted new characters in the film are people who debuted in 2025 - hardly evidence of a studio refusing to build anything new.

We went through what the sheer size of that roster does to everyone's screen time in our piece on whether Doomsday is an ensemble or a parade, and the honest caveat is that being confirmed is not the same as being served. But 'they will probably get four minutes each' is a different complaint from 'they have been sidelined', and people keep sliding between the two.

Where The Complaint Is Right

And now the uncomfortable half.

Solo films are the real scoreboard

An Avengers appearance is a cameo with a good agent. A solo film is a bet. On that measure the record is genuinely thin: Captain America: Brave New World took $413.6M worldwide against a $180M budget with a 47% critical score, and Thunderbolts* was the best-reviewed Phase 5 film at 88% and still finished at $382.4M - not enough on a $180M budget. Those results, which we broke down in our 2025 box office analysis, make future solo greenlights for new characters harder to justify internally. That is the mechanism the complaint is actually detecting.

The billing problem is real

Doom is the title character. The Fox reunion is the marketing hook - the story we examined in our look at the Fox universe absorption. The trailer's biggest moments belong to faces the audience has known for fifteen years. You can be on the cast list and still be the fourteenth item in the poster's billing block, and the newer generation almost uniformly is.

The mantle trap

Several of these characters inherited someone else's name rather than establishing their own - a new Captain America, a new Black Panther, a new Hawkeye. That structurally subordinates them to the legacy character even when they get the screen time, because the audience keeps measuring them against a predecessor. That is not sidelining exactly. It is something more insidious, and Marvel chose it deliberately.

The Scorecard

Marvel is not sidelining its new heroes. It is doing something more awkward: keeping every single one of them, and giving none of them the front of the poster.

What Would Actually Settle It

Three things, none of which we will know before December.

• Whether any new-generation character makes a decision that changes the plot, rather than reacting to one
• Whether the film's emotional climax belongs to a post-2019 character or a pre-2019 one
• Whether Marvel greenlights a solo film for anyone introduced after 2021 off the back of Doomsday's performance

That third one is the real test, and it is a business decision rather than a creative one. If Doomsday makes a billion and the next announcement is another legacy team-up, the complaint was right all along. If it makes a billion and Marvel finally commits to a Yelena or Sentry vehicle - the roster we walked through in our Thunderbolts guide - then this whole argument was a phase of a transition rather than the shape of the future.

Our position: the complaint is 40% right, aimed at the wrong evidence, and pointed at a real problem. The new heroes are not being cut. They are being kept at arm's length from the top of the call sheet, and that is a slower, quieter version of the same thing.