Tony Wang13 min readAvengers: Doomsday Out-Searches Dune 100-to-1 — but Fans Are Mocking It. A 5-Platform 'Dunesday' Study
Doomsday's trailer hit 100 on Google Trends; Dune never cleared 1. Yet Reddit runs on fatigue, YouTube defends it, and TikTok is Team Dune. We pulled all five.
Marvel dropped the Avengers: Doomsday trailer on July 20, 2026, and the internet did two completely different things with it at once. In search, it detonated — the phrase went from a baseline of 4 to a perfect 100 on Google Trends inside 24 hours, while the movie it's about to share a release date with barely registered a pulse. In the comment sections, the mood was the opposite: not anticipation, but a very loud, very funny exhaustion. We pulled the reaction live across five platforms, and the gap between "how much people are searching for this" and "how people feel about it" is the whole story.
Search says it's a blowout
Start with the number that isn't close. We pulled US Google Trends for three keywords — "Avengers Doomsday," "Dune Part Three," and "Dune Messiah" (the Frank Herbert novel that Denis Villeneuve's third film adapts) — over the full three months to July 22. The two films open on the same day, December 18, 2026. Their search interest is not remotely on the same day.
| Search term | Peak interest (0-100) | Peak date | Days above 5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Avengers Doomsday | 100 | Jul 20 (trailer day) | many (its own baseline) |
| Dune Part Three | 1 | Jul 8-9 | 0 |
| Dune Messiah | 1 | Jul 8-10 | 0 |
Both Dune terms flatlined in Google's "under 1" bucket for essentially the entire quarter — their single best day, July 8-9, reached a value of exactly 1. Doomsday's worst day in the window was still a 2, and its trailer-day peak was 100. If share-of-voice were only a search question, this study would be one line long: Avengers: Doomsday is out-searching its same-day rival by something like 100 to 1. But that's not the interesting part, because the search spike is a proxy for attention, not enthusiasm — and once you read the rooms where the attention lands, the enthusiasm goes the other way.
Reddit: the loudest reaction is a joke about death being meaningless
We pulled the r/movies official-trailer thread — one of a dozen near-identical trailer crossposts that went up simultaneously across r/marvelstudios, r/boxoffice, r/comicbooks, r/Letterboxd, r/videos and more within minutes of the drop — and hand-classified the top 41 comments. Only 2 read as earnest excitement. The other 39 were jokes, fatigue, or direct criticism.
The dominant bit isn't about Doom at all — it's about how little any of it matters. The trailer's return of Patrick Stewart's Charles Xavier set off a long chain of comments treating on-screen death as a punchline:
"Can't wait to watch Charles Xavier die for like the 5th time"
"Over at the X-Mansion, they call dying and coming back to life 'Tuesday.'"
"Welcome to comic books where every major death gets undone if you wait long enough"
Underneath the jokes is a real structural complaint: with the multiverse in play, one commenter noted, "it really lowers the stakes in any given conflict, knowing there are an infinite number of other universes where things could be different." Another predicted the giant ensemble is mostly "fodder" — that most of the X-Men "are going to have about as much screen-time as one complete character, which is to say not much."
And then there's the specific frustration that was flagged before the trailer even landed: that Doctor Doom has no build-up, arriving to fill a slot the abandoned Kang arc was written for. The clearest statement of it was also one of the most substantive comments in the thread:
"feels like they are doing infinity war, but with characters that we care less about and without the massive buildup for Thanos... the debacle with Kang's actor, since while his villain did not feel particularly formidable at least they had introduced him before, Doom comes mostly out of blue apart from a brief cameo."
A separate r/CharacterRant post made the same case at length, arguing the trailer "doesn't ignite anticipation" because the Avengers formula "novelty is entirely gone" — "Doomsday just looks like Infinity War but bigger and that's not enough anymore." This is the frustration the pre-reporting described, and it is real. But note what kind of reaction it is: it's loud, it's clever, and it's negative. On Reddit, being angry (or bored) is simply more upvote-friendly than being excited.
YouTube: the exact same trailer, defended
Now watch the room flip. We searched YouTube for the freshest reaction content and pulled comments on the biggest one — "Heroes Reforged," a channel reaction with 84,581 views a day after the drop. Sorted by likes, its top comments are the near-opposite of Reddit:
| Comment | Likes |
|---|---|
| Honestly, the Doom voice sold me. People forget that Downey can be a chameleon and is one of our strongest actors. I didn't hear him at all. | 401 |
| Stop it, that Doom voice is good. | 327 |
| Hector based on the numbers for viewing the trailer and ticket presales I think you might be too online buddy | 285 |
| Idk man, I'm hyped for this personally lol | 172 |
| Wait.. what? This is in the red?? I haven't seen much negativity about this at all. This looks amazing! | 161 |
| 95% positivity on this. RDJr will crush it. | 99 |
The pattern is not just "positive" — it's defensive. Commenters are pushing back on a negativity they claim not to even see: "This is in the red?? I haven't seen much negativity." "You might be too online." "I truly hope that one day people stop caring about what other people think... see you in December." Same footage, same week — but where Reddit rewards the cynical read, the YouTube trailer audience rewards the fan who tells the cynics to log off. Any single-platform sentiment number for "the Doomsday conversation" would be wrong; there are at least two conversations, and they barely overlap.
TikTok and Threads: everyone agrees on the date, not the winner
The one thing that unifies all five platforms is the matchup. December 18's "Dunesday" — Doomsday versus Dune: Part Three on the same day — is a real, organic, cross-platform tag, and it is where Dune quietly does its best.
On TikTok, the on-topic conversation is almost entirely "Dunesday"-framed and skews gently against Doomsday:
| TikTok caption | Plays | Likes |
|---|---|---|
| "Dunesday is your mission, should you choose to accept it" (#avengersdoomsday #dune) | 1,400,000 | 154,800 |
| "Brand new day > Doomsday" (#dune #avengersdoomsday) | 450,400 | 82,600 |
| "Avengers doomsday is getting bullied" (#avengersdoomsday #dune #imax) | 220,300 | 18,700 |
| "Dune part 3 music trailer is insane... Doomsday must be scared" | 196,000 | 15,800 |
On Threads, #Dunesday is loudest in international fandom — a Hong Kong Marvel account's explainer drew 1,584 likes, a Taiwanese post 1,521 — and the recurring debate isn't "will Doomsday be good," it's "can this even match Barbenheimer?" (the consensus lean: probably not, because unlike Barbie and Oppenheimer, "the two films' audiences are closer together"). A recurring lighter motif: because Florence Pugh plays Yelena in Doomsday and Princess Irulan in Dune, fans have dubbed December 18 "the battle of the Florences."
The business backstory, which surfaced in the r/entertainment "Dunesday" thread, is what makes the goodwill lopsided. Dune held the December 18 date first, with IMAX exclusivity locked; Disney moved Doomsday onto it and, per the thread's most-detailed comment, "100% expected Dune to bow down." It didn't. That's read across platforms as "Disney's hubris," and it hands Dune the underdog's halo even as it loses the raw-attention contest. The single most-repeated verdict of the whole event captures the split perfectly:
"Doomsday is going to make more than Dune lol. Dune will be the much better movie, but doomsday is going to crush it."
What a "share of voice" number actually hides
If you had run this study with one endpoint, you'd have gotten one wrong answer. Google Trends alone says Doomsday wins ~100 to 1 and Dune is invisible. Reddit alone says Marvel fatigue has won and everyone's exhausted. YouTube alone says the haters are "too online" and it's 95% positive. TikTok and Threads say the cool kids are quietly Team Dune. All four are true at once, about the same movie, in the same week. "Doomsday is louder about being watched; Dune is quietly better-liked" is only visible when you pull all of them and read the seams. That's the actual product of cross-platform social listening — not a single sentiment score, but the map of where a story is loved, where it's mocked, and where those are the same people saying different things depending on which feed they're in.
How we measured this
Google Trends: google_trends_explore_interest_over_time, keywords ["Avengers Doomsday", "Dune Part Three", "Dune Messiah"], geo=US, time_range=today 3-m, web search. Trends normalizes all keywords in a call to one shared 0-100 scale, so "Doomsday hit 100 and Dune never cleared 1" is a directly comparable statement within this pull, not two separate indices. A note on keyword choice: the December film is officially Dune: Part Three, which adapts the novel Dune Messiah; we charted both phrasings and they behaved identically (both flat).
Reddit: reddit_search, query "Avengers Doomsday," sort=relevance, time=month (a sort=new firehose returns keyword-agnostic noise; and a bare "doctor doom" query pulls trading-card and Dota-cosmetic results, so every query paired "Doomsday" with "Avengers"). Then reddit_comments on the r/movies trailer thread, the r/moviecritic "which are you more excited for" poll, and the r/entertainment "Dunesday" thread. The gotcha: Reddit's endpoint is RSS-sourced and exposes no vote-score or comment-count field, so — unlike YouTube and TikTok — the Reddit read here is qualitative (top comments per thread, hand-classified for sentiment), not vote-ranked. The "2 of 41 earnest" figure is our manual classification of the r/movies thread, offered as a directional read of a cynical general-audience sub, not a precise sentiment score.
YouTube: youtube_search, query "Avengers Doomsday official trailer reaction," upload_date=this_month, then youtube_comments on the highest-view result (84,581 views). Like counts are API-exposed and used as the ranking here.
TikTok: tiktok_search, keyword "Dunesday Doomsday Dune," 33 results, ranked by play count; only on-topic videos (matching Doomsday and/or Dune, not generic #fyp noise) are quoted. Play and like counts are API-exposed.
Threads: threads_search, query "Dunesday" (rich results); note that a narrower "2DunesBeforeDoomsday" query returned zero — the durable organic tag is "Dunesday," so we report that rather than the narrower pledge phrasing.
Release slate: boxofficemojo_calendar_date for 2026-12-18 confirms Avengers: Doomsday as a wide Walt Disney release (runtime 2h45m); imdb_search/imdb_title confirm the title IDs. A data gotcha worth flagging: Box Office Mojo's calendar-date endpoint listed only Doomsday (plus an It's a Wonderful Life re-release) as a wide release on December 18 at pull time — it did not yet carry Dune: Part Three — so the same-day clash is corroborated from the cross-platform coverage (r/entertainment, IGN India, S.H.I.E.L.D. HK) rather than a single box-office row.
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Frequently asked questions
How do fans feel about the Avengers: Doomsday trailer?
It depends entirely on the platform. On Reddit, the reaction skews to fatigue and mockery — in the r/movies trailer thread we pulled, only 2 of the top 41 comments read as earnest excitement, with the most common bit being a running joke about Charles Xavier "dying for the 5th time" and the multiverse cheapening every death. On YouTube, the biggest trailer-reaction video's most-liked comments are the opposite — a defense squad ("the Doom voice sold me," "95% positivity on this, RDJr will crush it") actively pushing back on negativity they say they don't even see. Same trailer, opposite rooms.
Why are Marvel fans frustrated about Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday?
The most-cited complaint is that Doom arrives with no build-up, inheriting a slot the abandoned Kang storyline was written for. A top r/movies comment summed it up: "feels like they are doing Infinity War, but with characters that we care less about and without the massive buildup for Thanos... Doom comes mostly out of blue apart from a brief cameo." A separate r/CharacterRant post argued the Avengers formula's "novelty is entirely gone" and "Doomsday just looks like Infinity War but bigger."
What is 'Dunesday'?
'Dunesday' is the fan name for the December 18, 2026 head-to-head release of Disney's Avengers: Doomsday and Warner Bros.' Dune: Part Three (Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of the novel Dune Messiah). Dune held the date first with IMAX exclusivity locked; Disney later moved Doomsday onto it. The organic #Dunesday tag is a genuine cross-platform phenomenon — a 1.4M-play TikTok, 1,500+-like Threads posts across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines — often compared (skeptically) to 2023's Barbenheimer.
Is Avengers: Doomsday more popular than Dune: Part Three?
In search, overwhelmingly — but that measures attention, not enthusiasm. Google Trends US interest for "Avengers Doomsday" hit 100 the day its trailer dropped (July 20, 2026); "Dune Part Three" and "Dune Messiah" never once cleared a value of 1 across the entire three-month window, a roughly 100-to-1 gap. Yet in comment sections the goodwill tilts the other way — the single most-repeated verdict across platforms is "Dune will be the much better movie, but Doomsday is going to crush it."
Do Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three really release on the same day?
Yes — both are dated December 18, 2026. Box Office Mojo's release calendar confirms Avengers: Doomsday as a wide Walt Disney release that day (runtime 2h45m). At pull time the same calendar row did not yet list Dune: Part Three, so the same-day clash is corroborated from cross-platform coverage (r/entertainment's 'Dunesday' thread, IGN India, S.H.I.E.L.D. HK) rather than a single box-office listing.
How was this social listening data pulled?
Live via Crawlora's Google Trends, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, and Threads endpoints on July 22, 2026, plus Box Office Mojo and IMDb for the release slate. Three gotchas: Reddit's endpoint exposes no vote-score field (so the Reddit read is a hand-classified qualitative pass, not vote-ranked), a bare "doctor doom" query pulls trading-card and game-cosmetic noise (so every query paired "Doomsday" with "Avengers"), and a "2DunesBeforeDoomsday" Threads query returned zero results while "Dunesday" was rich — so we report the durable tag.