Holy crap, a lot of people watched Marvel's Big Chair Showcase
Yesterday turns out to have been a landmark day in the world of furniture-based streaming, as Marvel’s very big, very slow effort to flex its casting muscles and get people to admit they do kind of still give a damn about its ability to field massive numbers of bankable stars for next year’s Avengers: Doomsday ended up generating pretty hefty viewership numbers. Per Deadline, the livestream—which, in case you didn’t watch it, was literally just five hours of chairs with the names of famous people on the back of them being set out—managed to rack up 275 million views on Wednesday. That’s, like, “well-contested soccer game or modestly well-viewed BTS video debut” numbers, which isn’t bad for something that must have cost all of about a hundred bucks to shoot. (Give or take Robert Downey Jr.’s appearance fee there at the end.)
And, of course, Marvel followed up the stream—which ultimately revealed 27 names, all pulled from past MCU (or X-Men) productions—with hints that it wasn’t even done, because there must always be more fervor. Downey, truly embracing his role as the hype man for this movie, used his social media accounts to ask “That must be it… right?” only to have the official Marvel marketing account respond with a “There’s always room for more.” All of which, we feel moved to remind you, is for a movie more than 13 months out from releasing, and which will presumably have to hold back one or two reveals for the people actually watching the dang thing in the theater come May 2026.
Still, maybe we’re the ones being foolish here: A lot of people watched those chairs, none of which, as far as we know, had ever even acted in a superhero production before. And it’s worth remembering that the existence of last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine—which actually managed to find some kind of balance between “cameos cameos cameos” and actually having fun with the characters with their names in the title—does suggest that there are still people at Marvel who know how to thread this needle. Still, that’s a truly wild number of people tuning to watch what was, essentially, the most boring hour of every school assembly ever, except much, much slower.