Hayley Atwell's coming back for Avengers: Doomsday, too

After taking a couple of years to tour the new material (to extremely mixed results), it sounds like Marvel is ready to truly embrace its passage into the Greatest Hits Collection era of its movie-making career. Having already lined up return appearances from Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans for its first Avengers movie since 2019, Doomsday, it’s now been reported that the studio has also asked fan-favorite Hayley Atwell to return for the 2026 tentpole.

This is per Deadline, which notes—unsurprisingly—that Marvel hasn’t commented on the casting news, which would presumably see Atwell play some version of tough-as-nails hero Peggy Carter in the Joe and Anthony Russo-directed film. (Atwell previously appeared as Carter in the first Captain America movie, several subsequent films, and her own TV show; an alternate universe version of her also appeared prominently in the What If…? animated series and Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness.) Deadline notes that Atwell has supposedly been quietly in talks to return to the MCU since 2021 or so, as part of plans to bring Evans back in some capacity as Captain America for a standalone film; those plans have now apparently been folded into Doomsday, which is presumably going to be so stuffed with The Shit You Used To Like that it’ll simply be too big to fail.

Atwell’s kept plenty busy in the years since she last appeared in the MCU, joining Heartstopper for a memorable role necessitated by Olivia Colman’s packed schedule, voicing the latest animated incarnation of Lara Croft, and appearing in upcoming movies like Paddington In Peru and the next Mission: Impossible film. Certainly, you could argue she’s been having a better time of it than Marvel itself; although the studio did have a big win with the sole movie it put in theaters this year—the billion-dollar Deadpool & Wolverine—it’s coming off of a 2023 that saw audiences largely indifferent to its efforts to create a new stable of heroes to fill out a second generation of superpowered stars. Hence why it now seems to be leaning so heavily on the old generation of stars; Downey was announced to be coming back as Doctor Doom at Comic-Con this summer, and news that Evans—who cameoed in Deadpool & Wolverine (although not as Steve Rogers)—would be back for Doomsday broke last week.

Avengers: Doomsday is scheduled for a May 2026 release.