Avengers: Doomsday Trailer Confirms Doctor Doom Is [SPOILER!?]

Marvel has been hyping up Doctor Doom for a while now, but maybe we've all got the villain wrong, and the new trailer for Avengers: Doomsday proves it.

After months of waiting, empty chairs, and teasers telling us that characters who had a perfect end to their story arc "will return”, we finally have a proper trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Although, unsurprisingly, it’s provided more questions than answers: Why is Shang Shi fighting Gambit from Deadpool & Wolverine? Why is Robert Downey Jr.’s voice like that, and why does it sound vaguely Irish when he says “faced”? And why does Steve Rogers look oddly mischievous and like he just walked in from Infinity War with that beard and haircut?

More importantly, is it possible that Dr. Doom — who seems to be on his own multiversal “we're putting the band back together” thing — isn’t actually the main villain here?

Let’s take a closer look.

Is Doctor Doom Really a Villain?

From the way this trailer is set up, I’m inclined to say no — at least not yet. As far as we can gather, Doomsday is going to be a movie about Victor Von Doom, in the same way that Infinity War was really about Thanos. The Russo Brothers, who directed both, have always gone to great lengths to make the villains of their biggest spectacles as grounded and three dimensional as possible, all the better for the audience to at least grasp their reasoning, if not quite their methodology.

This is one of the reasons why Endgame was so satisfying to watch, but the brothers have their work cut out for them with Doomsday. They essentially have to introduce one of the most legendary big bads in Marvel history while tying together the disparate strands of a wildly scattered MCU at the same time. By the look of things, Doomsday will indeed take place over the course of a single day, with Von Doom visiting various Avengers and Marvel characters of old across the multiverse to unite them against a new foe — possibly the Beyonder, a god-like being with the power to manipulate reality.

Doom will also be spreading the word about the incursions that are causing the multiverse to collapse in on itself — these might leave only Earth-616 and possibly one other universe remaining for the showdown in Secret Wars. Chances are that Doomsday will conclude with Doom seizing the opportunity to take the Beyonder’s powers for himself, making himself the ruler of that other universe in the process.

The question that the trailer doesn’t answer is whether Doom is acting in good faith in Doomsday or whether it’s going to be a con from the very beginning. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Russos will want to make the King of Latveria a genuinely sympathetic figure, using his backstory of persecution in the same way that we saw Magneto’s in X-Men: First Class. 

His inevitable heel turn in the movie will hopefully then be a tragic moment, perhaps the result of some old grudge or betrayal, possibly by Reed Richards or one of his variants. 

Secret Wars Already Proved Doom Wants To Save the Universe

This is where Doomsday and Secret Wars will get really interesting, as Doom genuinely does want to save the universe, if not just for practical reasons and self preservation. One of the character’s key traits is his megalomania, so it’s not that Doom is attempting to save others out of the goodness of his heart here, but more because he sees himself as superior, and thus responsible for others in some warped kind of way. 

This is probably why Thor and the Avengers seem willing to work with him. The tragedy of the film, and the likely twist we will get at the end, is that Doom will take advantage of the situation to make himself a god-like entity when the Beyonders have been defeated by the team he has brought together. In the run of Secret Wars comics from 2015, Doom used the powers to create a new Universe called Battleworld, where Susan Storm is his wife and they’re raising Franklin together as their own.

Similar to Endgame, this means that the Russo’s will leave us with a nightmarish alternate reality and perhaps only a dogged group of remaining Avengers to work together to fix it.

To do so, they’ll have to go up against their most powerful foe yet — in the comic, there’s even a scene where Doom rips out Thanos’ spine. Gulp!

The MCU Loves a Morally Questionable Villain

As I mentioned above, every Russo brother entry into the MCU so far has made an attempt to depict the villain as a most complex character — from the Winter Soldier all the way up to Thanos in Endgame. In fact, that first Russo MCU movie was the point at which the franchise really went to another level. 

Aside from Loki and Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash, perhaps, there weren’t a whole lot of memorable Marvel villains before phase three began, then all of sudden they became the main draw: from Michael B. Jordan’s tragic anti-hero Killmonger in Black Panther to Michael Keaton’s Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming, it was no longer enough for an MCU villain to simply be greedy or cruel, they had to have their reasons.

In terms of Marvel movies, this is a trend that dates back as far as Raimi’s Spider-Man movies — which is exactly the reason why we were all so happy to see Willem Dafoe’s Goblin and Alfred Molina’s Otto Octavius in No Way Home. We want a hero we can root for, but we also like the idea of a villain who’s understandable and — as Loki has shown — perhaps even salvageable, too. 

Will Doctor Doom break bad or will he just be bad to begin with? And in true anti-hero fashion, will he see the error of his ways at some point, even if it’s already too late? Whatever happens, he already looks like the main reason to go see this movie.