Every few months someone drops the hot take that video games are bigger than movies now. Revenue numbers get thrown around, charts get cited, and the discourse does its thing. The Avengers: Doomsday trailer just put that conversation on pause.

The first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday pulled in more views in its first 24 hours than the GTA 6 trailer did when Rockstar dropped it. That landed hard. Grand Theft Auto 6 was, for a lot of us in gaming, the event of the decade. The trailer broke records. It dominated every feed I had for weeks. My Discord was basically unusable the day it went live, and I loved every second of it.

Marvel's machine rolled right past those numbers.

I think the thing people keep missing in this whole "are games bigger than movies" debate is that they're measuring different things. Revenue? Sure, gaming pulls more money globally. That's been true for a while. But raw cultural moment velocity, the kind where your aunt who hasn't touched a controller since Mario Bros. 3 is texting you about what she just watched? Movies still have that edge. Marvel specifically has spent over a decade building a machine designed to do exactly that.

I'm not saying GTA 6 won't be massive when it actually launches. It will be. The energy around that game is unlike anything I've seen since, I don't know, maybe Wrath of the Lich King back in the day. My whole guild is already planning time off and we don't even have a release date pinned down yet. Rockstar has built something that reaches past the gaming audience in its own way.

But a trailer for a movie reaching more eyeballs than a trailer for a game? That tracks. Movies have a lower barrier to entry for the casual audience. You click play, you watch two minutes, you're in. A game trailer asks you to imagine yourself inside the experience. It's a different ask, even if the payoff is deeper once you're there.

The gaming space doesn't need to beat movies to prove its cultural weight anyway. I've watched communities form inside MMOs that outlast most film franchises. I've seen esports tournaments fill arenas that would make studio executives do a double take. The connections people build through play are different in kind, not just in scale. TJ and I were just talking about this last week, how Final Fantasy as a series has built this multigenerational fandom that no single movie could replicate, and he's been riding for FF since the 90s.

So yeah, the Doomsday trailer won the numbers game this round. Good for Marvel. But if you think GTA 6's launch isn't going to be its own kind of cultural supernova, you haven't been paying attention to how this community shows up.

Which medium made you feel something that stuck with you? That's the question worth asking. The answer depends entirely on who you are and what you love.