📈 Avengers: Doomsday Trailer Hits 503 Million Views, Second-Biggest Ever

Avengers: Doomsday's first trailer pulled 503 million views in its opening 24 hours, Variety reported in an exclusive — the biggest trailer launch in Disney's history. It's also the second-biggest trailer launch ever, full stop. Someone else already owns the top spot, and Marvel didn't take it from them.

That someone is Sony. Spider-Man: Brand New Day's first trailer hit 719 million views in the same 24-hour window, 216 million ahead of Doomsday's number. Disney just got outdrawn by a movie built around a character it doesn't even distribute.

Where does 503 million rank all-time?

Doomsday's 503 million clears Disney's own prior best by a wide margin: the Deadpool & Wolverine Super Bowl teaser, which drew 365 million views in February 2024, broadcast audience included. It also clears Spider-Man: No Way Home's 355.5 million from December 2021, and Avengers: Endgame's 289 million from April 2019, back when 300 million views for anything felt unthinkable.

Doomsday beat something else, too, a number the studio isn't putting on a poster: Grand Theft Auto VI's teaser, at 475 million views. Different medium, doesn't count on the chart above. Still. A superhero trailer just out-drew the biggest video-game launch in a decade, and nobody at Marvel is bringing that up Saturday at Hall H.

Does a bigger trailer mean a bigger opening?

That's where this gets useful instead of just impressive. Hollywood Reporter contributor Ben Zauzmer studied 421 wide releases from 2017 to 2019 and found a 0.86 correlation between YouTube trailer views and opening-weekend gross — for every additional 1 million views, a film's opening added roughly $1.14 million, on average.

Run that math on 503 million and you land near a $570 million opening. Don't hold Marvel to it. Zauzmer's sample predates an era where nine-figure trailer counts are routine, and December openings run softer than the summer slate his data mostly covers — Marvel's own cast-confirmation coverage already flagged that a holiday bow reads lower than a May one, then builds for weeks instead of one big weekend.

The three trailers on that board that have actually opened tell a messier story anyway. Endgame's 289 million views, the smallest number in the group, still produced the biggest opening weekend of the three: $357.1 million. Deadpool & Wolverine's 365 million views, more than Endgame got, opened to $211 million, well under half of Endgame's total. No Way Home split the difference: 355.5 million views, a $260.1 million opening. Views correlate with box office. They don't convert at a fixed rate, and a trailer count is a bet on interest, not a receipt.

Why is Sony still beating Disney at its own game?

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a Marvel Studios production — Kevin Feige produces it, Tom Holland plays a Marvel character under a Marvel-approved script. Sony owns the distribution rights and runs the marketing. That arrangement, dating back to a 1990s licensing split that carved Spider-Man off from every other Marvel property, usually gets filed under legal trivia. July 20 made it a scoreboard.

Disney's own in-house marketing machine (the one that sold Endgame, that sold Deadpool & Wolverine, that's selling Doomsday right now) has never once hit 719 million views on a trailer. Sony's team did it with a piece of the same franchise Marvel Studios makes movies inside of. That's not a close call and it's not a fluke: Brand New Day cleared Deadpool & Wolverine's entire 24-hour mark in eight hours, per trade tracking cited in our Brand New Day tracking coverage.

I'd call that the actual headline under the headline. Marvel didn't lose this round to a competitor. It lost to its own tenant.

What does the trailer actually show?

The extended look gives Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom his first spoken lines in character (a Latverian accent, a full costume reveal) opposite Chris Evans' returning Captain America and Chris Hemsworth's Thor. It also confirms names Marvel's faction-by-faction cast rollout hadn't reached yet: Paul Rudd's Ant-Man, Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova, Channing Tatum's Gambit, all appearing in footage for the first time.

The footage stages Avengers-versus-X-Men matchups nobody had put on screen before — Shang-Chi against Gambit, Yelena against Mystique, Sue Storm against Namor. Thor gets the line worth quoting: the gathered heroes, he says, will "return from the forthcoming battle either forged as a family for life or, well, dead." Marvel trailers don't usually let their heroes sound unsure about winning. This one does, on purpose.

Why can't Doomsday buy an IMAX ticket?

Disney tied ticket sales to the trailer drop and banked $16.5 million in advance sales on day one, roughly double what Deadpool & Wolverine pulled in its own first-day pre-sale window. The catch: those tickets only cover Infinity Vision, a premium-screen certification Disney invented this year, not IMAX.

The reason is scheduling, not preference. Warner Bros. locked exclusive IMAX rights for Dune: Part Three, which opens the same December 18 date. Disney couldn't get its own tentpole onto the format that usually adds meaningful opening-weekend share for a superhero release, so it branded its own version of premium large format and called it new. Convenient framing for a workaround. It's still a workaround.

What decides this story next?

Marvel takes Hall H on Saturday, July 25 — its first San Diego panel in two years, five days after the trailer dropped. Expect cast on stage, maybe a name the four faction teasers didn't cover. Then the real number: December 18, when Doomsday opens across from Dune: Part Three, without IMAX, against Zauzmer's math and against whatever Brand New Day does five months earlier in July. 216 million views is the gap right now. Whether that gap means anything gets answered at the box office, not on YouTube.

Sources and methodology

The 503 million view count, the comparisons to Spider-Man: Brand New Day (719 million) and the Deadpool & Wolverine Super Bowl teaser (365 million), and the $16.5 million first-day advance-ticket figure come from Variety's exclusive reporting, published July 21, 2026, and syndicated the same day via Yahoo Entertainment. The all-time trailer-chart entries for Spider-Man: No Way Home (355.5 million) and Avengers: Endgame (289 million) are drawn from contemporaneous trade tracking aggregated by ComicBasics and cross-checked against Koimoi's and Deadline's reporting on the Deadpool & Wolverine record when it was set in February 2024. Endgame's $357.1 million opening weekend and No Way Home's and Deadpool & Wolverine's opening-weekend totals follow Box Office Mojo's and Variety's reported domestic actuals. The trailer-views-to-box-office correlation (0.86 coefficient, $1.14 million per additional 1 million views) comes from Ben Zauzmer's analysis for The Hollywood Reporter, covering 421 releases from 2017 to 2019. Trailer content (the Doctor Doom reveal, the Avengers-X-Men matchups, Thor's dialogue) is drawn from Variety's, Rolling Stone's and Collider's coverage of the July 20, 2026 trailer. The Infinity Vision certification and its relationship to Dune: Part Three's IMAX exclusivity are reported by Marvel.com, Reactor and Moneywise. The July 25 Hall H panel is confirmed on Marvel.com's official SDCC 2026 schedule. Updated July 22, 2026.