Avengers: Doomsday Theory Changes Everything About Tony Stark’s Endgame Death

Have we been thinking about Tony Stark’s tragic Avengers: Endgame death all wrong? A persistent Avengers: Doomsday fan theory suggests that we have, and the reasoning behind the theory is definitely compelling.

Ever since Robert Downey Jr. was revealed as the actor who would bring Marvel’s most beloved villain, Doctor Doom, to life in the MCU, we’ve asked ourselves why Doom would look like Tony Stark, who Downey Jr. portrayed from 2008 until Endgame in 2019. The directors working on Doomsday have stayed fairly tight-lipped about it, with the Russo brothers merely stating that there’s “no one else in the world” who could play the character like Downey Jr. will in the upcoming movie.

Perhaps there’s a good reason that Doom has Stark’s face. To understand the biggest theory about why the casting might make sense (other than money,) we need to go back to the events of Avengers: Infinity War, where Stark and sorcerer Stephen Strange battled Thanos to stop him from acquiring the Infinity Stones.

Before Thanos arrived, Strange looked ahead to 4,000,605 alternative futures to determine the outcome of their effort, and among those scenarios, he told Stark that he had witnessed only one in which the Avengers were successful. Up until the final moments of the battle in Endgame, Strange hadn’t informed Stark of what would have to happen for them to win. Seeing Strange raise a single finger at a pivotal moment, Stark suddenly knew that he would have to sacrifice himself to snap away Thanos and his minions for good. It was a tragic, noble death that had enormous ramifications for the MCU.

But what if Strange wasn’t revealing the whole truth? What if, when he was looking at all those versions of the future, he went beyond their run-in with Thanos and saw Doom wearing the familiar face of Tony Stark? In the blur of 4,000,605 futures, couldn’t Stark still very much stand out as the man in metal armor destroying reality? Wouldn’t he have thought the only way to save reality as we know it was to guide Stark into killing himself instead?

Strange was never the biggest fan of Stark, but he may have felt he needed to do everything in his power to avoid the future Doom is heading toward. Not yet having truly grasped the nuances of the multiverse, Strange may have assumed that at some point, Stark completely loses it and becomes the ultimate version of his worldview in Age of Ultron, but instead of trying to control everything by building a suit of armor around the world, he might attempt to control the multiverse, with catastrophic results. Strange may not have fully understood Doom’s unfamiliar armor, but his best bet may have been to find a way to take Stark out of the equation regardless. These are the kinds of cold decisions Strange has often had to make in the pages of Marvel Comics.

Though there’s plenty to dissuade us from buying into this theory, like assuming Strange wouldn’t have all the time in the world to explore those four million plus futures and establish the real difference between Stark and Doom, there’s also so much we don’t know about how everything comes together in Doomsday, and why Doom looks just like Stark. We didn’t even get to see Doom’s face in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and we still don’t know how Loki’s role as the steward of the multiverse affects the unfolding of events.

Fan theories are just that: theories. Most of them turn out to be nonsense. They’re fun to chat about and poke holes in, but they’re all we’ve got until Marvel unveils more of what Doomsday will bring audiences later this year. What we do know is that Downey Jr. has agreed to play Doom following his long tenure as Iron Man for a very specific reason, and our current set of superheroes looks up to Iron Man as a force for good. That may be their undoing.