Hayley Atwell’s name sat outside the five-hour Marvel Studios livestream that laid out the full main cast of Avengers: Doomsday, and Ryan Reynolds’ name was outside it too. That absence now matches Deadline’s report that Deadpool was not expected to appear in Avengers: Doomsday or Avengers: Secret Wars.
Five hours is a long time to leave one of the MCU’s most visible characters off the board. In a franchise built on crossovers, the gap mattered because the first Avengers: Doomsday trailer had already pushed Doctor Doom in the spotlight through Robert Downey Jr. and put the X-Men and the Avengers on the same collision path.
Marvel Studios and the livestream
The five-hour livestream was the public reset. Marvel Studios used it to announce the full main cast of Avengers: Doomsday, and Reynolds did not appear in that reveal. For readers tracking the project as a casting story rather than a plot story, that omission is the cleanest signal yet that Deadpool was not being positioned as part of the initial roster.
That matters because cast announcements usually do more than fill credits. They tell the market which characters the studio wants to sell first, which names are being held back, and where the sequel conversation is headed. When a character is absent from that kind of rollout, the studio is shaping expectations long before opening night.
Summer 2025 to Deadline
In the summer of 2025, a report said Reynolds was confirmed to be part of the Avengers: Doomsday cast. Deadline later moved in the opposite direction, saying Deadpool was not expected to appear in Avengers: Doomsday or Avengers: Secret Wars. That is the core contradiction in the story: one report put him in the cast, the later one took him out of both films.
For the audience following MCU casting the practical takeaway is simple. The earlier report created a presumption of a Deadpool-sized role in the crossover plan, but the later reporting cooled that expectation and pushed the focus back to the announced ensemble. If you were reading the cast list for Reynolds, the current reporting says not to count on him being in the lineup.
Doctor Doom and 2027
Avengers: Secret Wars is scheduled for 2027, which means the second half of the crossover still sits far enough out for casting to keep shifting. The first Avengers: Doomsday trailer has already set the franchise’s framing around Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom and the X-Men facing the Avengers, so each absence carries more weight than it would in a smaller release.
Whether Ryan Reynolds ends up in Avengers: Doomsday is still the open question that matters most. Right now, the stronger read is that Marvel Studios has chosen to move forward without making Deadpool part of the public cast plan, and that is the version readers should trust until the studio puts him on screen.
