Last year’s San Diego Comic-Con was kind of a weird one because of the Hollywood strikes that were going on at the time, so it wasn’t necessarily a surprise that Marvel Studios only had one real reveal at that show (it was a trailer for The Marvels). But going into this weekend’s show, the general consensus among fans and industry onlookers was that surely Kevin Feige would be making some big announcements not just after a quiet 2023, but also because of the increasing chatter about the MCU losing its groove.
And, well, Feige did have one huge reveal in store for us in Hall H on Saturday night: Robert Downey, Jr. is returning to the MCU, not as Tony Stark/Iron Man, but rather as the highly anticipated villain Doctor Doom. And he will be the centerpiece of the next Avengers movie, Avengers: Doomsday, the sequel formerly known as Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.
O.K.… cool, I guess?
It’s been about five years since Downey, Jr. left the MCU after the death of Iron Man in 2019’s almost universally praised Avengers: Endgame. By the time The Fantastic Four: First Steps is released in 2025, where he will presumably show up in some capacity, it will have been six years. One the one hand, that’s a fairly long stretch to have had no RDJ in the shared universe that he helped build, but on the other, there’s a whiff of desperation to this whole thing that can’t help but diminish the excitement over the news. (And of course I use “desperation” liberally, as we are talking about very, very rich people here.)
Putting aside any nerdy questions about how exactly Downey, Jr. could now be playing Victor Von Doom and how it will play out in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we have to look at the current state of Marvel Studios and the perceived quality of the Phase 4 and Phase 5 MCU movies and shows. (We’re still in Phase 5 in case you’re wondering.)
Is the casting of Downey, Jr. the latest – and greatest, but not in a good way – example of Marvel’s stunt casting?
Take Deadpool & Wolverine, which just had a huge opening weekend to be sure, but the film has also had a fairly mixed critical reception, suffering from a thin plot and weak character arcs which take a backseat to the glorification of stunt cameos from across the history of Fox Marvel movies (and more). It also brought back Hugh Jackman as Wolverine after one of the finest superhero movies ever made, Logan, had given the character a pretty perfect send-off back in 2017.
This seems to be an increasingly problematic mindset for Marvel Studios. While the nature of the Multiverse Saga in which we are currently centered (stuck in?) certainly makes stunt casting a tantalizing prospect for filmmakers and fans (we finally got John Krasinski as Reed Richards!), we’ve seen that it can also be a trap (John Kraskinski’s Reed Richards is already dead after 10 minutes of screen time!). I’m sure Jackman got paid a load of money for Deadpool & Wolverine, but did he really think the script justified bringing his iconic character back? (And yes, of course these are two different multiversal versions of Logan, and no, that is not the point.)
Is the casting of Downey, Jr. the latest – and greatest, but not in a good way – example of this trend? He’s a huge star, of course, and he was simply awesome as Tony Stark every time he played him. There would be no MCU without this guy, without a doubt. But bringing him back to play a different character is just the most extreme version of one of the problems that seem to be ailing Marvel these days. The return of the directing duo the Russo brothers is also worth noting here, as the pair had helmed four Marvel movies, including Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, before moving on to other projects. But suddenly they’re back too, ready to direct Doomsday and its follow-up, Avengers: Secret Wars.
Still, it’s only fair to ask if we, the fans, are part of the problem. We wanted a shared universe like this for as long as I can remember, and I can remember at least as far back as the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk show! The MCU, when it was good, was very, very good. It scratched an itch for comics fans and general audiences alike, and reshaped Hollywood in ways both good and bad. And now we’re complaining about the return of the franchise’s centerpiece star (or at least half of us are, judging by the poll running on IGN right now).
It’s not like Feige and his team didn’t provide a bunch of other hype-inducing spectacle over the weekend. There were the drones that created Galactus’ head rising in the sky above San Diego, just like in the pages of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four (only that was NYC). Deadpool & Wolverine stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman took a victory lap with a bunch of surprise guests. The casts of three different upcoming Marvel epics appeared on stage in Hall H, including Harrison Ford himself, who is now officially a Hulk! And then an array of Doctor Dooms (or Doombots) assembled, with one of them removing his mask to reveal that he was Downey, Jr. – and he was back!
But where was the X-Men news? Why do we still not know who the Avengers are in Avengers 5 and 6? And what about the Young Avengers? When are they coming? Oh, how about that Avengers vs. X-Men rumor that was swirling all weekend? We even prepped an article on that just in case it was true…
Maybe, just maybe, it’s OK if the MCU doesn’t recover from its current malaise.
That’s not Kevin Feige or Marvel’s fault. The dude brought some pretty big news to SDCC, but we always want more, more, more. The notion that Deadpool & Wolverine was going to get the MCU back on its right footing was also a fan-created thing – Marvel never said that film was the salvation of their shared universe, but the fans built it up as such. Could it be that the reason we’re getting all this meta-casting and that cameos are increasingly the norm is that it’s because Marvel thinks it’s what we want – because we always want more?
This is a crazy idea, I know, but maybe, just maybe, it’s OK if the MCU doesn’t recover from its current malaise. You know what, guys? We’ll survive. There are other movies, other shows, other types of media to consume. Subscribe to Criterion! And besides, we’ll always have our Infinity Saga Blu-ray set that comes in an Infinity Gauntlet. They must’ve made one of those, right?
Talk to Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
