Is it really so shocking that Robert Downey Jr is to return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not as Iron Man/Tony Stark, but as the supervillain Doctor Doom? Well yes, because nobody had really seen this coming when the actor was unveiled at Comic-Con in San Diego last weekend. Despite the advent of the multiverse after Stark’s death in Avengers: Endgame more than five years ago, the studio had opted not to bring the superhero back as a version of himself from another reality, even though this would have been easier than Doctor Strange opening a portal to the nearest Himalayan tea shop. The sense was that Downey Jr was probably done with this superhero stuff, that any return for Iron Man would have to be in the distant future and that it would most likely involve a new actor in the suit.
The prospect of the Oscar-winner ever playing Stark again has almost certainly been torpedoed off the map by the announcement that Downey Jr will return in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, both of which are expected to hit cinemas by 2027. In many ways this is an ingenious move by Marvel. Downey Jr is the actor who kicked off the studio’s most popular phase with 2008’s Iron Man. But given he is now playing an entirely new character, producers can hardly be accused of retreading a tired old path. This is not Sean Connery back in the saddle as 007 in Never Say Never Again, or Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the T-800 for the umpteenth time: there is the potential for something more interesting to happen with the casting, and no Marvel supervillain needs an actor with serious weight to portray them more than Victor von Doom.
Despite being a mainstay of the comics as the terrifying, magic and science-wielding arch-nemesis of Marvel’s first family, the Fantastic Four, Doom has often been a total joke on the big screen. Julian McMahon’s take in 2005’s Fantastic Four was less sinister, diabolical Latverian monarch, more disgruntled tech bro who finally snaps after too many password resets. The character’s return in 2007’s equally execrable Rise of the Silver Surfer – injured face miraculously healed because apparently cosmic energy blasts double nicely as a high-end skin care routine – saw him riding the latter’s cosmic surfboard over waves of mediocrity straight into our collective disappointment. The less said about Toby Kebbell’s bloodless portrayal in the misguided “dark” 2015 reboot from Josh Trank, in which the often excellent Briton displayed all the charisma of a malfunctioning Roomba, the better.
Crucially, however, these were not Marvel Studios films, certainly in the modern sense. And with an actor of Downey Jr’s guile and smarts in the suit, there is no reason to believe anyone will ever remember how terrible they were if Doomsday reaches its potential, any more than audiences for 1978’s splendid Superman lost any time worrying that 1951’s Superman and the Mole Men, starring a version of Kal-El who appears to have spent less on his suit than the average budget cos-player, was weaker than a human being living under Krypton’s red sun.
Downey Jr as Doom is such a significant upgrade on the disgraced Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror (Doomsday was originally titled The Kang Dynasty) that all of Marvel’s worries over the decision to axe the latter after the actor’s significant legal troubles seem to have dissipated. Rather than reminding us of one of the studio’s major missteps, the disappointing, Kang-led Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, this new Victor von Doom will hopefully get the chance to be introduced in the brand new, highly anticipated 60s-set The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which is due out in 2025. Now all director Matt Shakman has to work out is how to zing the awesome foursome and their nemesis from the alternate reality they seem to be living in all the way to the main Marvel universe.
How will the studio explain away the fact that Von Doom looks exactly like Tony Stark? It would be most unlike Marvel to simply ignore this essential fact, and producers are surely not going to spend a reported $80m (£63m) plus on re-recruiting such a famous face only to ask him to keep wearing his mask? Could the version of Tony Stark in the Fantastic Four’s reality have ended up becoming Doctor Doom rather than Iron Man? If so, why did the Russo brothers (directors of the next two Avengers films) introduce RDJ on stage at Comic-Con as Victor von Doom?
Still, these are the kind of far out “What if?” scenarios that could have fans weeping in joy at the sheer multiversal high jinks of it all. And yet it might also mean we never get to see the real Von Doom in the MCU. Downey Jr as the supervillain is not mere throwaway stunt casting, like we saw in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Hayley Atwell as Captain Carter; John Krasinski as Reed Richards). This guy has to hang around long enough to be the new Marvel big bad in two Avengers movies. He can’t just turn up as a Stark variant who ultimately ends up being replaced by the real Von Doom, can he?
What if this whole shebang just doesn’t work at all? The sports world is ravaged with tales of middle-aged footballers who returned to their old clubs in a blaze of late-career glory and were gone in under a year. It’s never easy to repeat the same trick a second time and in Marvel’s case they are trying to do something even more ambitious. This is the casting equivalent of trying to bottle lightning … twice. Put Iron Man and Doctor Doom in a locked room for decades and they still might struggle. On the other hand, is that the sound of Marvel thunder we hear?