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When Robert Downey Jr. won his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for portraying Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, it felt like proof that there was more to the actor than just Tony Stark. But just a few months after taking home that sought-after statuette, the actor revealed that he was returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe - this time as the villainous Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday.
Brie Larson followed up her Best Actress win for Room (2015) with a foray into blockbusters, starting with Kong: Skull Island (2017), and then headlining MCU’s first female superhero film. Despite some trepidation from the studio, Captain Marvel (2019) was a smashing success, grossing more than $1 billion worldwide. Having established the character with that ‘90s-set origin story, Larson immediately reprised the role a few months later for Avengers: Endgame.
Aside from a brief cameo in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Larson didn’t play Carol Danvers again until The Marvels (2023), which paired her with Ms. Marvel’s Iman Vellani and WandaVision’s Teyonah Parris. The result was a box office bomb, and may have spelled the end of Larson’s MCU career. She is absent from the cast list and promotional material for Doomsday, and Captain Marvel has not been announced as being part of any upcoming Marvel movies.
While many Marvel Zombies are excited to welcome Downey back into the fold, there's also been a pronounced feeling in some corners of fandom that coming back for seconds might be too much of a good thing. It's worth noting that he's far from the first actor or filmmaker to join - or re-join- the MCU with an Oscar in hand. Here's a handy guide some of the other Hollywood talent who have followed the Oscar-to-Marvel pipeline over the years and how they fared in the MCU.
Ten years after winning Best Actress for Shakespeare in Love, Gwyneth Paltrow helped kick off the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Pepper Potts in Iron Man (2008). She reprised the role in both Iron Man sequels and multiple other installments, from welcoming Peter Parker (Tom Holland) into the MCU in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), to saying goodbye to Tony Stark in Avengers: Endgame... even if she doesn’t quite remember which ones she was in. Although Downey is returning to the MCU, there’s been no mention of Paltrow coming back, too.
A Best Actor winner for 1985's Kiss of the Spider-Woman, William Hurt nabbed the key role as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross in The Incredible Hulk (2008). This was only the second MCU film, and Hurt played a key role in forming the franchise’s first connective tissue by appearing in a post-credits scene alongside Downey’s Stark. He reprised the role in both Captain America: Civil War (2016) and Black Widow (2020), and was set to do so again in Captain America: Brave New World (2025) before his untimely death. Hurt was replaced in the role by Harrison Ford, who may — or may not — be in Doomsday
In between his two Best Actor wins for The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and The Father (2020), Anthony Hopkins spent three films portraying the Norse god Odin in the Thor trilogy. He got to give a dignified goodbye to the character in Thor: Ragnarok (2017), which released his demonic daughter Hela (Cate Blanchett) from her long imprisonment. Although Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston are still playing their Thor characters in Doomsday, they’ve had to do so without the guidance of their divine father.
Cate Blanchett has achieved the rare Oscar feat of winning both in the supporting and lead categories, for The Aviator (2004) and Blue Jasmine (2013), respectively. A few years after the second, she portrayed one of the most memorable MCU villains in Thor: Ragnarok (2017). In order to defeat her evil god Hela, Hemsworth’s Thor had to destroy all of Asgard... and hers is a rare MCU death that seems to be sticking.
Coming off the history-making success of Endgame, Marvel seemed to realize they needed to shake things up, and they recruited Chloé Zhao to do just that. Zhao had just won Best Picture and Best Director statuettes for Nomadland, her rugged portrait of modern American poverty and rootlessness that seemed as far from Thanos and the Infinity Stones as one could get. She was tasked with bringing a similarly grounded perspective to Eternals (2021), which introduced a whole new team of superhero characters to the MCU.
But the Eternals — immortal warriors who have been protecting the Earth since before humans and supposedly inspired most mythologies — are a heady brew, and not easy to explain. "I think we bit off as much as we could chew on this one," producer Nate Moore admitted Entertainment Weekly in 2021. Zhao’s Eternals only grossed $400 million at the worldwide box office, and even more remarkably, it was the first MCU film to be certified “rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes. There are no plans for a sequel, and Zhao has since returned to Oscar-worthy art house fare like last year’s Hamnet.
Coming right off of her Best Actress win for Black Swan (2010), Natalie Portman joined the MCU early on as Thor's love interest Jane Foster in the 2011 franchise-launcher. Her role expanded in follow-up Thor: The Dark World (2013), where Jane got to meet Thor’s fellow gods in Asgard, but her MCU future was uncertain after skipping The Avengers (2012) and Thor: Ragnarok (2017). She finally returned for Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), in which she got to wield Mjolnir in her own right as Jane gained God of Thunder powers to combat her cancer. But Jane ultimately succumbed to her illness, wrapping up Portman’s Marvel career.
In between giving one of the definitive superhero performances of the 21st century in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, Christian Bale won Best Supporting Actor for The Fighter (2010). That success made it seem like Bale had no use for a return to superhero cinema, but at the urging of his children he took on the scene-stealing villain role of Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder (2022).
Ben Kingsley won Best Actor for his performance as Mohandas Gandhi in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982). It was only his second film role, and in subsequent decades he expanded his career across a variety of blockbusters and literary adaptations as well as playing other historical figures. He joined the MCU in Iron Man 3 as Trevor Slattery, who subverts the Orientalist tropes of Iron Man’s classic comic book villain, The Mandarin. Kingsley seems to enjoy the role, because he’s since dusted off Trevor for appearances in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) and the recent Wonder Man series.
Lupita Nyong’o followed up her Best Supporting Actress win for 12 Years a Slave (2013) with a few appearances as the motion-capture character Maz Kanata in the Star Wars sequels, but scored a much bigger blockbuster role in Black Panther (2018). As Nakia, Nyong’o was both the love interest for T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and a capable freedom fighter in her own right. She reprised the role for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) following Boseman’s death, but unlike Shuri (Letitia Wright) and M’Baku (Winston Duke), Nakia has not crossed over to Avengers: Infinity War or Avengers: Doomsday. It’s possible she’ll return for Black Panther 3, but that film has not yet been cast.
Fifteen years after her Best Supporting Actress win for The Constant Gardener (2005), Weisz entered the MCU as the mentor-figure Melina Vostokoff in the long-awaited solo film Black Widow (2020). Weisz also voiced the character in a Season 2 episode of Marvel’s What If…? animated series, but unlike David Harbour and Florence Pugh she did not reprise her Black Widow role for Thunderbolts* (2025) or Doomsday.
In the wake of his Best Original Screenplay win for Sinners at this year's Oscars, Ryan Coogler is set to return to the MCU at least one more time for Black Panther 3, where he may have even more creative control. But since he still has a whole new X-Files show to make first, don’t expect to see Black Panther 3 until at least 2028.
This is one that hasn't happened... yet. In the wake of winning his second Best Supporting Actor statuette for Green Book (2018) — which followed his first win for Moonlight two years prior — Mahershala Ali reportedly went to Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige and declared his intention to star as the vampire hunter Blade for the MCU. The project was announced at the 2019 edition of San Diego Comic Con 2019, but has so far failed to materialize seven years on.
Instead, every year or so fans have gotten to read a new story in the Hollywood trades about what a disaster the brainstorming process has been. The movie has gone through multiple writers and directors, and suffered the added indignity of Wesley Snipes reprising the role in Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) and declaring: “There’s only been one Blade, there’s only ever gonna be one Blade.”
Following that film, Blade was officially pulled from Marvel Studios’ release calendar, and development seems to have permanently stalled, with Feige recently admitting that the project’s failure makes him “feel like a gigantic loser.” Still, we're hoping that Ali eventually gets his shot at ice skating uphill.
