The Avengers made Marvel's biggest experiment work: take a group of people who don't particularly like each other and somehow convince us they belong together.

Fourteen years later, Avengers: Doomsday has the same problem on a ridiculous scale.

This time we're not just dealing with Iron Man arguing with Thor or Steve Rogers trying to keep six Avengers focused. We've got Avengers, New Avengers, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Wakandans, multiple universes—and Doctor Doom sitting right in the middle of it.

So for this Road to Avengers: Doomsday rewatch, we're going back to 2012 to figure out why the original Avengers actually worked.

We get into how quickly the movie establishes each Avenger's personality, why letting them fight and disagree is essential to eventually making the team believable, Steve becoming the field leader, Loki accidentally creating the Avengers in both comics and the MCU, the escalation from the Tesseract to thousands of incursions, and why we desperately miss this version of Hulk.

Then there's the bigger Doomsday problem:

Who the hell leads everybody?

Steve Rogers? Sam Wilson? Reed Richards? The X-Men? And what happens when saving one universe might mean another one doesn't survive?

And maybe most importantly—what happens if Doctor Doom doesn't walk into the room offering a fight?

What if Doom offers them a solution?

Because the worst version of Avengers: Doomsday is just a parade of characters showing up so everyone can cheer.

The rotating Avengers shot in 2012 worked because the movie spent two hours making us believe those six people had finally become a team.

That shot was the payoff. It wasn't the story.

Avengers: Doomsday doesn't just have to assemble everybody.

It has to earn another Avengers moment.

Road to Avengers: Doomsday continues as we figure out what each movie adds to the board.