Robert Downey Jr. as the MCU’s Doctor Doom? There are two reasons for this
Late Saturday night at SDCC, Marvel shocked fans when it revealed that none other than Robert Downey Jr. would be returning to the MCU, not as Tony Stark, but as Doctor Doom in a new movie, Avengers: Doomsday.
Although the audience responded explosively, there was complete uncertainty in the immediate aftermath. In what way will this function in practice? With this, what precisely are they messing with?
The way I see it, there are two main options, one that sounds more solid and better than the other. The option I don’t like is:
Robert Downey Jr. playing an evil Tony Stark version
While it wasn’t made explicit, it could be argued that prior to The Avengers, Doctor Doom will appear in the upcoming Fantastic Four movie, which has been confirmed to take place in a non-MCU universe (even though obviously, they will eventually collide). So, maybe in this world Tony took a different path and ended up as a masked, armored bad guy instead of a masked, armored good guy.
This isn’t just pulled out of the air, though, there’s actually comic source material precedent for this kind of story. There’s one, the infamous Iron Man, where Victor Von Doom plays Iron Man. But then there’s another, Earth-11029’s Anthony Stark where Doom and Stark switch minds, and as such, Doom ends up walking around in Stark’s body. This could technically circumvent the Russo Brothers’ statement that Downey Jr. was specifically playing Victor Von Doom, not Stark, because technically, he would do the same. But I like this less than the second option:
