adidas Turns the Superstar Into an Avengers Roster, and Doctor Doom Gets the First Pair

adidas wants you thinking about its 1970 basketball shoe again, so it did what every brand does when the ad budget needs a shot of nostalgia: it called Marvel. The pack reimagines the Superstar as a trio of "Avengers: Doomsday" characters, with Ant-Man getting a red, hexagon-patterned build, Shuri landing a black-and-gold Black Panther homage, and Doctor Doom claiming a metallic grey pair that looks like it was forged rather than cut and stitched.

The character work goes deeper than a logo swap. The Ant-Man pair uses textured red leather layered with hexagons in varying sizes, patent-leather stripes with silver serrated edges, a silver portrait of the character worked into the tongue, and an insole reading "Pick On Someone Your Own Size." Shuri's shoe translates her futuristic battle suit into black textured leather, with gold detailing around the backtab standing in for her vibranium necklace, gold-studded stripes, and purple laces and outsole. Doctor Doom's pair pairs a black leather base with weathered, metal-finish grey on the stripes and backtab, metal studs, a green tongue bearing his silver likeness, and an insole that simply declares "Doom Has No Rivals." Each shoe ships in action-figure-style packaging built to double as a display piece, with both adult and grade-school sizing planned, and adidas is already teasing "many, many more" pairs before the pack is done.

The casting underneath the sneakers is doing as much work as the sneakers themselves. Robert Downey Jr., who spent over a decade as the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Tony Stark, returns this December as Doctor Doom, playing the franchise's next big antagonist instead of its most famous hero, which is the kind of reversal that turns a merchandise drop into an actual conversation. The villain shoe borrowing its swagger from MF DOOM's hip-hop legacy is not an accident either. It is a second layer of reference built for people who were never going to see the movie but will absolutely buy the shoe.

None of this is new territory for adidas, which has leaned hard into pop-culture licensing this year, Pokemon's 30th anniversary collection among the bigger recent swings, treating its back catalog of silhouettes as blank canvases for other people's fandoms rather than relying on its own archive to do the selling. No price has been announced, and the firmest date anyone has is "around December 18," when "Avengers: Doomsday" opens in theaters, which makes this pack a trailer for a trailer: a sneaker drop promoting a partnership that will outlast most of the film's reviews. Expect the real marketing push, and the real prices, once Marvel starts rolling out theater dates and adidas decides how many of those teased "many, many more" pairs are actually real.

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Source: Sneaker News

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →