Could Hayley Atwell’s Avengers: Doomsday Return Finally Do Right By Peggy Carter?
Captain Carter deserves more.
For Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel is getting the band back together in a major way. The upcoming team-up film was initially set to introduce an all-new Avengers line-up, but now it seems like reuniting the original Avengers is an equally important priority.
Last week TheWrap reported that Chris Evans will return to Marvel’s Cinematic Universe as Captain America, joining Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom and Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange. As Doomsday is qualified to tackle the multiverse in earnest, Evans may be playing a variant of his stalwart, patriotic hero — and the same might be said for Hayley Atwell, another Captain America alum joining the new film.
Per Deadline, Atwell is officially set to reprise her role as Peggy Carter in Doomsday. As plot details are still being kept under tight wraps, it’s not clear what role she’ll play in the Marvel project just yet. Given her history in the MCU, though, it’d only make sense to bring Atwell back as “Captain Carter,” a Peggy variant who takes the Super Soldier Serum originally designed for Steve Rogers. This would be Captain Carter’s second live-action appearance, and hopefully it can help redeem this version of the character, especially as her last cameo felt like a major letdown for fans.
Peggy Carter became an Avenger in What If. Will she lead a new team in Avengers: Doomsday?
Since debuting alongside Evans in Captain America: The First Avenger, Atwell has cameoed in a handful of Marvel films, from Ant-Man to Avengers: Endgame and, most recently, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. She’s also become a major player in Marvel’s animated anthology What If, the first MCU project to reimagine Peggy as Captain Carter.
Despite being a consistent presence in the franchise, though, Atwell hasn’t always gotten her due. Her latest cameo in Multiverse of Madness — which brought Captain Carter into live-action — was disappointing both for fans of Peggy and for Atwell herself. She’s introduced as a member of the Illuminati, an all-powerful group of heroes from another Earth, but is swiftly defeated by the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). Her demise is one of many grisly murders in the Doctor Strange film, and perhaps one of the most frustrating too, as she’s impaled with her own shield before she can really flex her powers.
Per Atwell, the experience was “frustrating,” in part because it seemed to make Peggy the butt of her own joke.
“When she says ‘I could do this all day,’ people were like, ‘Haha, but you didn’t cause you got sliced in half by a Frisbee!’” Atwell told Inverse in 2023. “And so I got a lot of, ‘Hah, she’s lame because of that.’ And yeah, maybe she wasn’t as taken care of in that movie as she could have been.”
Atwell’s cameo in Doctor Strange 2 was “frustrating,” but her role in Doomsday could redeem it.
Atwell says that playing Captain Carter in live-action was a good experience overall — but that doesn’t necessarily negate the need for a do-over. Peggy is a crucial figure in the MCU, whether she’s founding S.H.I.E.L.D. on Earth-616 or serving as the Captain Britain of another universe. She may not be everyone’s favorite character, especially as she seems to pop up everywhere, but all her cameos combined don’t really add up to much in the grand scheme.
Despite Marvel’s efforts to elevate Peggy beyond the role of “plucky love interest,” she’s never truly gotten the chance to stand on her own. (It doesn’t help that her one solo adventure, the spinoff series Agent Carter, is no longer considered canon.) Doomsday will slot the character into yet another ensemble project, but there’s a high chance it could also redeem her hasty demise in Multiverse of Madness. It won’t fix every qualm fans may have with the character, but it’s certainly a start.
