Victor von Doom

With rumours making the rounds about Marvel Studios’ casting of the Fantastic Four, I’m thinking about how they will handle Victor von Doom.

Almost a decade ago, when it started looking like Fox & Marvel were going to work things out for Marvel Studios to share the rights to use X-Men, as Sony eventually did for Spider-Man, I said “eyes on the prize”: forget the X-Men, Marvel Studios needs to get their hands on Doctor Doom.

That was an exaggeration ...

A long aside about Marvel, Fox, and the X-Men

When I said right after the release of Winter Soldier that Marvel Studios had the perfect media franchise I thought maybe I was speaking the obvious too late. But their best days were still ahead of them. Right now a lot of people think their best days are now already behind them, but not me. Yeah, Marvel Studios have had a run of stuff which has not been bad but has been weak. I think that has largely been echoes from covid shaking everything up.

I believe that Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige already deserves a Thalberg award, and is gunning for one when he says “there’s 80 years of the most interesting, emotional, groundbreaking stories that have been told in the Marvel comics, and it is our great privilege to be able to take what we have and adapt them”. Disney Imagineers are undoubtedly hard at work disassembling that deep bench of experiments in overlapping, serialized stories to assemble new giant killer francise robots from the parts.

Dongwon 송동원 raises a legitimage concern about that:

honestly pretty annoyed by the “thanos was right” thing. I feel like it mocks a lot of us long term x-men fans who are deeply invested in magneto’s perspective as a more radical, revolutionary voice in comics’s most prominent and consistent examination of marginalization.

especially considering how many alt-right bros latched onto Thanos’s fascist genocidal logic. I know it’s ridiculous, but I honestly feel like “Magneto was right” actually means something to a lot of us that isn’t just contrarian, crypto-fascist, genocidal apologia.

I dread the days feige finally figures out what he wants to do with the x-men, honestly. I genuinely enjoy so much of the MCU nonsense, but what makes the x-men so special is so antithetical to the underlying logic of the MCU machine.

But I feel hopeful that Dongwon has it backwards. I think that as Feige’s control over Marvel Studios strengthens, he will give more latitude to the different creators, which will enable stuff like giving us the X-Men with a sensibility in tension with what we have gotten with the movie Avengers. Plus I think that desite a wobbly start, streaming series will turn out to be a great format for Marvel. Their first long run of movies like a huge, slow TV series was great but showed how the canvas of a few features each year is still not big enough for what the characters and setting can do.

Marvel Studios has their Game Of Thrones waiting in reserve: Chris Claremont’s epic, soap-operatic run of X-Men comics. Douglas Wolk, who literally wrote the book on how much storytelling space there is in Marvel Comics, says:

If you only know the X-Men from Fox’s movies, you may not suspect how deep that catalog gets, and how many characters it involves. Marvel Comics currently publishes 11 monthly X-Men-related titles, and that’s not even a record. 2019’s simultaneous miniseries House of X and Powers of X — the former about mutants establishing a nation of their own called Krakoa, the latter showing the X-Men’s secret past and what might become of them 100 and 1,000 years in the future, each triggering bombshell revelations in the other — set up seemingly endless story possibilities that have been playing out ever since. The current era of X-comics, focused on Krakoa becoming a global political force, could easily turn into a cluster of movies and TV shows and specials bigger even than the MCU in its current form.

I believe it. We are mad at him now, but remember that the first guy to show up writing TV inspired by a youth reading Claremont’s X-Men drew on its moves to create Buffy The Vampire Slayer as not just a hit TV show but a cultural phenomenon. There is an army of nerdy, brilliant, seasoned middle-aged creators whom Marvel Studios can tap to work on this.

So yeah, I was exaggerating when I said that Marvel Studios could forget about how buying Fox meant getting the X-Men back. But. Spending a few billion dollars on Fox would have been worth it to the Mouse even without the X-Men.

Victor Über Alles

At this point I really feel the Marvel Cinematic Universe having a Doom-shaped hole in it.

Marvel Studios has been doing more and more cosmic stuff, giving us references to the baffling cosmic godlike Celestials. Thanos is gone for the forseeable future, which points us right to Galactus. They don’t need the Fantastic Four on stage to tell stories about Galactus, but his key story involves them so you want them there before too long. Plus when RDJ wriggled out of the golden handcuffs, it left them with an opening for the real irresponsible “hero” mad scientist with his fingerprints all over Marvel stories: Reed Richards, Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four.

To bring Galactus on stage, Marvel Studios needs the human who stands taller. With Richards on stage, they need the man whose brilliance is greater. With Celestials on stage, they need the mortal daring enough to rival their power.

Scientist. Wizard. Tyrant. Meglomaniac. Genius. The greatest villain in Anglophone literature.

How I would do it

Obviously it starts with teasing.

First a post-credits stinger, of course. I like Moviebob’s idea from his elaborate, clever Fantastic Four pitch of giving him just one word after the first FF appearance — “RrrriiiihchARDS!!”. But it could be anything. Maybe a secondary character who got driven off earlier in the movie shows up to reveal that they were not simply defeated, because they got away with an unnoticed MacGuffin to deliver to Doom. Maybe have Doom on his Latverian throne steepling his fingers to signal to civilians that he ranks like a Thanos-like master villain, so they ask their nerdy friends about him.

Then there is a thing in a movie or two where we catch a glimpse of him on the periphery. Maybe he’s on video of some shenanigans and someone says “is that who I think it is?” and one of the less experienced heroes is all “who?” and gets blown off with “the most dangerous person on Earth — you don’t want to know”. Maybe he aids someone with an escape.

Then we get a proper cameo, with Doom in his genteel, regal mode. Maybe he’s at an international conference where he debates with Shuri and arrogantly corrects her about nanotechnology or some such — the worst part being that it turns out later in the movie that Doom was right.

Then in his first major appearance, Doom crushes a few heroes (or villains!) in an early scene. Who is this guy? Reed is there to explain with some essentials from Doom’s elaborate backstory. This includes a flashback of young Doom swearing his vendetta against Richards over The Accident leaving a few tiny scars which only made him look more badass. Toward the climax of that movie, Doom gets his hands on some earthshattering power — maybe siphoning it off of Wanda or an Eternal — and the first thing Doom does is wish away the scars he owes to Richards, triumphantly removing the mask. Of course doing that delays him enough that he does not get time to complete his plan to open a portal, nuke Madripoor, turn the Sahara into a garden, or whatever. The heroes (or villains!) witness how Doom is brilliant and powerful but undone by his own ego.

Then we get a movie with a one-scene cameo. Some character we need to establish as badass gets a flashback to a few years back, when for a moment they knocked Doom’s mask off. We don’t want to overwork the disfigured villain trope so this will be the first, last, and only time we see Doom severely scarred. Richards didn’t know about this! Nerds go yeah and civilians go whoa.

At this point Marvel can treat Doom as a fixture of the world. We don’t see him much, but it seems like he is connected to almost everying. Some character has Latverian tech. Someone has a meeting cut short with Namor or Contessa de Fontaine because Doom is here to talk. Et cetera.

Then we get a movie where magic is a big piece of the plot. In the course of things, Reed Richards and a few other characters track down a renegade monk from Ta Lo or Kamar-Taj who explains that the only person who has the plot token or secret knowledge or whatever our heroes need is Doom. “But you don’t want to talk to that madman.” Why not? “I was there when he put on the mask for the first time. In his obsession, he reached for it before it had finished cooling. He did not scream, or even gasp. There was only the sizzle as it burned his flesh.” Reed is shocked ….

Responding to early hype

Added later

After thinking about the surprise casting of Robert Downey, Jr. as Doom, together with Marvel Studios saying that the first Fantastic Four movie is set in an alternate-timeline-1960s, here’s the way I would play it, which I suspect is close to what Marvel Studios will do:

This new timeline — call it Earth-1961 — is a lot like the early years of the main comics timeline of Earth-616, but Victor just does not exist. Tony was Reed’s college frenemy, and The Accident screwed up his heart instead of his face, of course. Tony-Doom is all technology, no magic, and has Stark Industries instead of Latveria, but is otherwise pretty much the Doom we know. Downey hams it up as a guy who is Tony With The Reckless Meglomania At Eleven.

Earth-199999 (the main timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe) has had Victor von Doom all along. He is almost the same as 616-comics Doom. Mask. Mad science. Magic. Dictator of Latveria. The big difference is that he is not a supervillain, just a weirdly-dressed tyrant, because he killed his universe’s Reed Richards before the Fantastic Four origin could happen.

Then shenanigans bring Tony-Doom and the Fantastic Four to Earth-199999.

Victor is chilling in his castle, watching the news, and there is this fake Doom. Victor seethes. Then … what’s this? Do his eyes deceive him? No. No. No!

RRRIIICCCHHAAARRRDDDSSSS!!!!!

Also …

When the Thing shows up in Earth-199999, it just turns him back into human Ben. That way, in the next movie, we get a scene where things are dire and they need the Thing and Reed says, “in this universe I can switch you back and forth with no problem”, and … guess what happens.