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Tthey have the problem of creating the next part of your high-tech around Doctor Doom and that no one knows if he is Marvel’s Darth Vader, or a character from 20th Century Fox’s horror movies. We won’t be getting Doom in the future Avengers: Doomsday if Marvel’s original plan for Thanos didn’t fall apart when Jonathan Majors, who played Kang, was removed from the permit. And we don’t know if the next throw of Robert Downey Jr (previously Marvel’s Iron Man) in this section is another kind of artistic work that will make sense when we see the finished film, or just a button price.
The stakes are so high that the geekosphere is looking for every possibility, no matter how small, of what kind of Doom we might have in this film. Will this be an interesting, accurate take on the Latverian dictator? Or they will Amazing I’m going to go into a variety of simples and give duplicates that are more than Tony Stark in eastern Europe?
No one knows, and the success or failure of this next hero could decide the fate of the entire franchise, which is probably why everyone is grasping at straws. Some reports this week have said so the existence of Doctor Doom’s coffee shop at SXSW London Marvel’s latest pop-up is a good reason to hope we’ll be getting some sort of supervillain from gaming.
Are we reading too much of this stuff? Quite possibly. But the wise already thought that because the menu seems to refer to Doom’s mother Cynthia, the Romani family that Doom descends in the game (the Zefiros) and the Latverian dictator of King Vladimir Fortunov (whose throne he steals), this means that Marvel can prepare to give us a modern story instead of what is happening in this country. The fact that the Russo brothers showed up to oversee the lattes suggests that someone at Marvel is giving this advice on purpose.
That’s what we have to do The Avengers: Doomsday directorial reviews at the SXSW special event is another story entirely. “Part of our challenge has always been that there’s something that we love from a game, and there’s something that you know other fans of the game like. Sometimes those things are the same, sometimes they’re different,” Joe Russo said during the panel. “Usually, what we say in the film is our favorite thing about the game, but what’s original to our story, it’s new – because we always see it as our job not to tell you a story you’ve heard before.
He added: “But I would say that Doom strikes a very good balance between being specific and different from the original story that takes place in the film, and also conveying what’s so amazing about Doom in the comics.”
The mixed images here go along with reports from a recent CinemaCon video, which suggests that Downey Jr’s Doom will come with a hood, mask and a different voice than Iron Man, but he hasn’t given any details yet. If the new version of the armed despot is indeed magical, this suggests that the universe we first encountered, within the history of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, prefers to tell traditional Silver Age Marvel stories.
We’ve already been given a version of Mr. Fantastic, Sue Storm et al that could have been pulled from a 1960s comic book, sans the flip-flops, the familiar flip-flops that were lost in most of the later adaptations. There are probably some traditional, Kirbyesque characters from Marvel back there – even if they were, it seems odd that they weren’t mentioned in the film.
But that is the point. Doom is not an ordinary person who can be turned into a great franchise machine. The whole plea is that he is not just strong, or clever, or pathetic, or useless, but all these things at once, piled on top of one another. He is a scientist and a magician, a king and a mother’s son. This is what Doomsday has to take. Doom has to be great: an iconic figure of history, politics, magic, architecture and a lot of arrogance.
The concern is that Marvel will look at this glorious nonsense and choose the best option and make him something we have already seen and understood. And yet Doom who is so attached to Tony Stark is in danger of being just another guy in a mask monologuing abstract portal rules to tired people in spandex. A proper Doom — a massive, impossible, sing-song doom — might just be what the MCU needs. After a few years back, Marvel won’t be able to benefit from another major villain being replaced. The studio needs a dictator in a metal mask, standing on a palace balcony, absolutely convinced that the only thing wrong with nature is that he hasn’t been put in charge yet.
