Evans rejected dozens of Marvel pitches before saying yes to Doomsday

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Chris Evans has opened up about why he has returned for Avengers: Doomsday , admitting he turned down "dozens" of pitches from Marvel over the past eight years.

"When we finished Endgame in 2018, Lou [D’Esposito] and Kevin [Feige] took me to dinner and they were like, 'We’d love to keep doing movies with Steve Rogers as Nomad,'" Evans told Entertainment Weekly after the Marvel SDCC 2026 panel . "And I said, 'Okay, well, what do you got?' They showed me a pitch, and it was a great pitch, but for whatever reason, it just didn't feel right at the time. I kind of wanted to… I was a little precious. I wanted to preserve it. But I just said, 'Please keep pitching.'"

Nomad is an alternate identity that Steve Rogers takes on in the Marvel comics. During a run during the mid '70s, Rogers became disillusioned with the United States government and decided to become a man without a country. Anthony Mackie recently teased that this is the version of the character we'll meet in Avengers: Doomsday.

Evans added that none of the MCU ideas from Feige and co. felt right until he got the call about Doomsday.

"Over the course of eight years, I probably heard at least a dozen pitches," he continued. "And they were all wonderful. It just never quite felt right. And you do start thinking maybe that's the expiration – whatever it is – maybe it's not right because it's just not right."

However, it was another actor's return that changed the game for the Avengers star. "I got a phone call from my team saying there’s a rumor [Robert Downey Jr. is] talking to Marvel, and I was like, 'Uh, oh. What does this mean?' And all of a sudden it felt right. Joe [Russo] gave me the pitch, and Downey was [back]. It just all of a sudden… it was like, 'This is it.'"

Elsewhere at the Marvel panel, some new footage from Avengers: Doomsday debuted , teasing the history between Doom and Reed Richards. It was also announced that a Ghost Rider movie with Ryan Gosling is happening and that David Jonsson is joining the cast of Black Panther 3 .

Avengers: Doomsday hits theaters on December 18, 2026. For more, check out everything that happened at SDCC 2026 in our San Diego Comic-Con 2026 live coverage as well as checking out our breakdown of all the upcoming Marvel movies and shows on the way.