Doctor Doom Is a Way Better Villain for the Avengers Than Kang the Conqueror
Fans are still reeling from the news that Doctor Doom will be played by Robert Downey Jr., but no matter how you slice it, it's a step up from Kang the Conqueror.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is at a crossroads right now. Their post-Endgame dealings have been an overinflated mixed bag that supersaturated the market. Even their biggest hits have been more about giving a fond farewell to the past, whether it is goodbye to James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Sony’s earlier Spider-Man movies, or Fox’s X-Men movies. Projects that try to build toward the future have had some success, but also some notable failures.
It’s also been little help that the current Multiverse Saga lacks the same creative stability which underwrote the Infinity Saga’s build up of Thanos and the Infinity Stones. There’s been stuff about legacy and the multiverse, but bringing it together was a challenge. Briefly though, the MCU appeared to have something great going with the introduction of Kang the Conqueror as played by Jonathan Majors.
Initially, Majors seemed to be the cinematic universe’s most valuable get in Phase 5. Introduced as He Who Remains in the finale of Loki’s first season, Majors’ exhausted lunatic set-up the stakes for what the MCU would be about going forward: a reality where free will would potentially come at the cost of complete multiversal annihilation. Majors would play a more fearsome version of Kang in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania where even in defeat he remained a danger due to the post-credits reveal that there were countless Kang Variants ready to strike—a threat the fifth Avengers movie would have made good on with the subtitle of The Kang Dynasty.
Then the skeletons came flying out of his closet and his real-life behavior made him too toxic to appear as a comic book villain. Disney held their breath while watching his legal proceedings, but once he was found guilty of assault and harassment, they had to scramble for a new direction. They released the second season of Loki with Majors’ roles intact, but the ending made the Council of Kangs’ fate ambiguous, as they might be dealt with off-camera by the TVA’s soldiers.
Ever since late last year, word was that Disney was going to move the focus to Doctor Doom as the new big bad and scrap Kang completely. Perhaps they knew that Majors’ hold on the character tainted it too much to recast. There are even rumors that Majors’ contract insisted that they could not recast Kang. Regardless, they pushed forward with Doom as the top threat of the Multiverse Saga by renaming the next Avengers movie Avengers: Doomsday.
While that wasn’t unexpected, what was a big shock was Saturday night’s announcement that Robert Downey Jr. will be returning to the MCU to play the supervillain. Does this make Doom a variant of Tony Stark or is this just a completely separate role, much like Chris Evans can be both 20th Century Fox’s Human Torch and Disney’s Captain America? Hell, it’s fitting either way, considering Downey is fresh off of playing multiple parts in The Sympathizer.
This casting and sudden thrusting into the spotlight has some feathers ruffled. Fans have been wanting a solid, comics-accurate Doom for decades, and so far the best we’ve had is Joseph Culp comedically overacting in the unreleased 1994 Fantastic Four movie from Roger Corman. The idea of a Stark-adjacent Doom has people groaning, even if they have traded roles in the comics here and there.
Though we don’t know how much of this Victor Von Doom is recycled Tony Stark, it’s all just as well. Scrapping Kang for Doom was always going to be a step up, even before Majors fumbled the bag harder than a female MMA fighter on a certain Star Wars Disney+ series.
First thing, there’s plenty of time to build up Doom. We have The Fantastic Four: First Steps on the way next year, which can easily plant the seeds for what Doom is all about, especially with the confirmation that the hero team will be appearing in both Avengers: Doomsday in 2026 and its 2027 follow-up, Avengers: Secret Wars. Throw in a mid-credits cliffhanger here and there and you’re good.
After all, people really overestimate how much Thanos we got before Infinity War. All he had was two credits teasers (three if you count the ominous spaceship from Thor: Ragnarok), and a few minutes of screentime in Guardians of the Galaxy. We didn’t even fully understand what he truly wanted until the opening minutes of Infinity War. Otherwise, the build to him was more about the introductions and retroactive introductions to various MacGuffins as Infinity Stones.
Kang himself (themselves?) is not the true multiversal threat set-up by Phase 4 and 5. As of now, he’s little different from Infinity Ultron, Strange Supreme, Cassandra Nova, and Scarlet Witch. Those are all “threats to the multiverse” characters who could be punched into submission in some form. The real problem is multiversal entropy, something introduced in Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and later discussed by the Council of Kangs at the end of Quantumania. The multiverse simply cannot sustain itself, even with Loki sitting on a throne, trying to hold it together like an Asgardian Atlas.
We’ve already seen how Kangs deal with that, and it failed in the long run. We need someone else to coldly decide that the ends justify the means. Fittingly, this was Doom’s role in the 2015 Secret Wars comic where he had the will and power to save enough of the crumbling multiverse but left a lot to be desired in the way he handled his godhood in the aftermath.
One of the big problems with Kang in his limited MCU appearances is that he hasn’t been written as the threat he’s meant to be. Oh, don’t get me wrong, he is responsible for countless genocides across reality and has talked up how he has killed so many Avengers. Majors’ performances gave him menace when needed, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Janet Van Dyne was able to act like he was something truly frightening, but all of Kang’s deeds were tell with no show. The most fearsome things we’ve actually seen him do are bully Ant-Man, kill a lot of extras, and command a joke character in his henchman MODOK.
Thanos was also all tell and no show before Infinity War, but he was not shown getting defeated by Ant-Man and a deus ex machina of a mutated ant swarm. Kang was unique in that his threat was more about numbers than anything else, but without a real alpha villain standing tall amongst the others (ie. Ultron’s main body alongside his drones), the Council of Kangs would have felt like a collection of cannon fodder with nothing substantial behind it. It’s like the “inverse law of ninjas” theory where a party of one ninja is equally as powerful as a party of 100 ninjas, only instead of ninjas, it’s the guy from Creed III.
Doctor Doom is one of the last few major villains the MCU can pull out of their bag and treat as a major deal. Bringing him in while also backing up the Brinks truck to Downey’s estate is the ultimate “break glass in case of emergency” play. They just might be able to pull it off, but the real question is what will be left once they do, because you cannot use Downey as MCU Doom in the long run.
Be on the lookout for Annihilus casting calls in a few years, I guess.
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Gavin Jasper is a buffalo wing enthusiast who loves the hell out of comic books and professional wrestling. In the end, that makes him an expert…