The decision to cast Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars continues to divide opinions.
On the surface, Marvel Studios has simply cast an Oscar-winning actor as a villain he can almost certainly bring to life in a way that will make fans happy. The problem is, Downey brings a great deal of baggage with him; namely, the fact he spent upwards of a decade playing the MCU's Iron Man!
With the next Avengers movies set to end the Multiverse Saga, it's hard to escape the feeling Variants will come into play. Still, the Russos have repeatedly said Downey is playing Victor Von Doom, perhaps dispelling the notion of Doom being an alternate-reality version of Tony Stark.
Time will tell, but in the meantime, we have a very cool piece of fan art unmaking Doom as a scarred Downey. We'd expect and hope the MCU's take on the villain to be far more hideously scarred than this but Marvel Studios surely won't want to keep the actor's face hidden for too long (he is, after all, a proven box office draw for the studio).
The solution to that, of course, will be for Doom to heal himself once he recreates the Multiverse in his image as Battleworld.
Marvel Studios may have cast Downey because they legitimately believe he's the best possible actor to bring this villain to life on screen. They needed a heavy hitter to help them effectively move on from Kang and the actor fits the bill.
He's said to be earning upwards of $100 million for Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, only returning to the MCU under the proviso that the Russo Brothers helm these movies.
"You’re the best damn fans in the world, and we’ve missed you," the Russo Brothers recently said of their MCU return. "When we made Avengers: Endgame we truly believed that it was the end of the road for us in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We had put all the passion, love and imagination that we had into the Winter Soldier, Civil War, Infinity War, and then culminated it all with Endgame."
"All within a few years. We had spent everything we had creatively, and we left all our emotions on the floor. But in the time since, we began to feel that there was perhaps one story where we could find a new narrative path forward. It’s the reason we fell in love with comic books in the first place. That story is Secret Wars."
We cannot express how excited we are to dive back into this world, and explore such a deliciously complex character like Victor Von Doom," the filmmakers added. "And there is no better friend or collaborator to do that with, [than] THE great [Robert Downey Jr.]."
Check out this cool new Avengers: Doomsday fan art below. With the movie not set to be released until May 2026, it's likely to be a while before we see the real Doom...