Marvel fans are still reeling from the news that Robert Downey, Jr. has been cast as Doctor Doom in the MCU. We’re all still trying to wrap our heads around the question of how the man who made Iron Man a household name can now be playing arguably Marvel’s biggest supervillain. But whatever the eventual explanation, one thing is abundantly clear – Avengers: Secret Wars now has the villain it needed all along.
To explain why, let’s take a step back to explore Doom’s importance to the Secret Wars saga and why Marvel really needed him front-and-center if they were going to pull off an adaptation of the venerated source material.
Doctor Doom’s Role in Secret Wars
Right off the bat, it’s important to point out that there are actually two major Secret Wars comics in the Marvel catalog (not counting all the other sequels and spinoffs and toy tie-ins). The first is 1984’s Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, by Jim Shooter, Mike Zeck and Bob Layton, and the second is 2015’s Secret Wars, by Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic. It’s probably safe to assume that the Avengers: Secret Wars movie will draw inspiration from both stories, even if the Multiverse Saga has definitely been leaning toward the latter so far.
Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars is a crossover where a who’s who lineup of heroes and villains (including Spider-Man and members of the X-Men, Avengers, and Fantastic Four) are whisked away to an artificial planet called Battleworld. There these characters are made to battle one another for the amusement of an omnipotent being called The Beyonder.
The series culminates in Doctor Doom stealing the Beyonder’s power and becoming omnipotent. Doom slaughters our heroes when they refuse to join him, though they’re quickly resurrected by a healer named Zsaji, and he’s eventually defeated through the combined efforts of everyone on Battleworld. The series wound up introducing several far-reaching changes to the Marvel Universe, not the least of which being that this is where Spider-Man first bonds with the Venom symbiote.
Secret Wars and its accompanying toy line proved wildly popular, quickly spawning the much less well-received Secret Wars II the following year. 2015’s Secret Wars is widely regarded as a much superior follow-up.
Secret Wars 2015 serves as the climax of Hickman’s long run on Marvel's Avengers and New Avengers. Those two books chronicle the steadily worsening state of the Marvel multiverse, as more and more universes are annihilated through the phenomenon of Incursions. It’s eventually revealed that these Incursions are being caused by a conflict between the Beyonders (an entire race of beings with the godlike powers of the original Beyonder) and a fanatical cult leader called Rabum Alal. Rabum Alal is eventually revealed to be Doom, waging a high-stakes war to save the multiverse from the Beyonders’ grand cosmic experiment.
As Secret Wars itself opens, the multiverse is down to just two remaining universes – the classic Earth-616 and the Ultimate Universe (Earth-1610). The heroes of both worlds battle one another when the final Incursion hits, but to no avail. The multiverse completes its inevitable collapse, with only Mister Fantastic and a handful of superhero refugees surviving aboard a universal life raft.
But existence doesn’t entirely end. At the last moment, Doom and his ally Molecule Man manage to steal the power of the Beyonders (we’re noticing a pattern here). Doom uses his newfound godhood to create a new Battleworld – this one stitched together from the shattered fragments of dozens of dead universes. On Battleworld, these various universal fragments exist as baronies policed by the Thor Corps and Sheriff Stephen Strange. And they all exist under the benevolent rule of God Emperor Doom.
Secret Wars chronicles the rise and fall of Doom’s reign, as the survivors of Earth-616 and Earth-1610 fight to overthrow him and restore the multiverse. In the end, it all comes down to a confrontation between Doom and Mister Fantastic. Good wins over evil, and the Fantastic Four are able to rebuild the multiverse (with a lot of help from Reed and Sue Richards’ son, young Franklin Richards, who has the mutant power to generate entire universes).
Secret Wars even ends on a happy note for Doom himself. Despite transforming himself into a god through sheer force of will, Doom was never able to repair his scarred face. But when he wakes up in the rejuvenated Earth-616, Doom finds his face has been restored. Even the greatest tyrant in the multiverse has been given a second chance.
Why Avengers: Secret Wars Needs to Be About Doom
The most important takeaway here is that Doom is a pretty essential figure in both versions of Secret Wars. In both tales, Doom is the one who usurps the Beyonder (or Beyonders) and molds himself into a god. Doom is the final boss of the story. But despite his central role, for a long time there was no indication that Marvel actually planned on making Doom the central antagonist of Avengers: Secret Wars.
Up until now, the Multiverse Saga hinged on Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror. We’ve learned that Kang and his many variants are a clear and present danger to the entire multiverse. So much so that one variant called He Who Remains orchestrated the creation of the Time Variance Authority and whittled the multiverse down to a single “Sacred Timeline” so as to prevent another multiversal war between Kangs. But after the events of Loki Season 1, the multiverse is back, and so is the threat of Kang.
Marvel was clearly positioning Kang, not Doom, as the architect of the Secret Wars conflict. Even the pervasive rumor that Doom would be revealed in a post-credits scene in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever failed to pan out. The fifth Avengers movie was originally announced as Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, suggesting that Kang’s feud with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is what was meant to set the stage for Secret Wars. Every indication was that Kang was Marvel’s new Thanos for the Multiverse Saga.
All of that changed with Majors’ legal troubles and subsequent firing and the tepid response to Kang’s first big-screen appearance in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. If Kang was supposed to be the next Thanos-level threat to the MCU, Quantumania didn’t exactly sell the idea. At some point, Marvel decided to pivot away from Kang and toward Doom, so that Avengers: The Kang Dynasty is now being reworked to become Avengers: Doomsday. Now Doom, not Kang, is the linchpin of the journey to Secret Wars. And that’s exactly as it should be.
We’re not here to argue that the MCU can’t or shouldn’t make significant changes to the comic book source material. It’s certainly happened in the past, with key changes like Tony Stark becoming the father of Ultron or The Mandarin being fundamentally reworked in Iron Man 3 and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
Sometimes, characters who play a key role in a comic book storyline are cut out of the picture for the cinematic adaptation. Characters like Silver Surfer and Mephisto are a big part of the Infinity Gauntlet comic, yet they’re nowhere to be found in Avengers: Infinity War. We don’t feel the movie suffered because of their absence. It wouldn’t have made much sense for Marvel to shoehorn them into the picture, and that’s not even counting the fact that they didn’t have the movie rights to Silver Surfer at that point.
But when it comes to Secret Wars, it’s a lot tougher to separate the conflict from Doom himself. The climax of both versions of Secret Wars is about the Avengers, X-Men and FF taking on a Doom who has molded himself into an all-powerful god. Doom is such a fascinating villain in these stories because of his boundless ego. He sees himself as the rightful master of all, so he simply takes the power for himself. You can try to make Kang the God Emperor of Battleworld, but it just doesn’t have the same impact as seeing Victor von Doom transforming himself from ordinary man to master of existence. That’s Doom’s shtick.
There’s also the fact that Secret Wars 2015 hinges so fundamentally on Doom’s flawed personality. For all his incredible power, Doom is a profoundly damaged man. His hatred of Reed Richards is balanced out by the fact that Doom covets Reed’s family. One of the first things he does after creating Battleworld is brainwash Susan Storm and her children into becoming his own loving family.
And as mentioned earlier, Doom, for all his amazing power, proves utterly incapable of healing his ruined face. It’s not so much a lack of ability as it is a reflection of his own inner self-loathing and doubt. Doom can crown himself God Emperor, but that doesn’t mean he can fill the gaping void in his soul. In the end, he fails because he wants himself to fail.
That’s something that was missing in the MCU’s take on the Infinity Gauntlet storyline. In terms of motivations, the MCU’s Thanos is quite a bit different from the source material. The MCU Thanos is obsessed with creating balance and preventing life from growing out of control. The comic book Thanos is in love with the physical personification of Death, with every act of killing a tribute to his beloved. He’s also deeply self-loathing and self-sabotaging, a fact that proves to be his undoing in Infinity Gauntlet.
In Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, we never got a sense of Thanos as a tyrant who hates himself deep down and wants to fail. He feels the weight of his sacrifices, but he sees it all as necessary steps in doing what needs to be done. With Doom, Marvel now has a chance to truly dig into the psychology of a villain whose power is matched only by his self-hatred. Again, Kang isn’t the right character for that. Doom is.
Only by making Doom the linchpin of Avengers: Secret Wars can Marvel really do justice to the source material. We can continue to wonder and debate about how exactly Downey can be playing Doctor Doom, but what matters is that we are getting Doom at long last. That can only be a good thing for the build-up to Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027.
For more on the future of the MCU, brush up on every Marvel movie and series in development, and see why the Marvel Studios SDCC was still a bit of a letdown.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
