Robert Downey Jr. As Doom Is Marvel Admitting Everything Post-‘Endgame’ Didn’t Work

Last night (July 27) at San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel Studios ended its Hall H presentation with a shocker: Robert Downey Jr., formerly Iron Man and Tony Stark, is the new face of Doctor Doom in the MCU. The reveal of RDJ — who was in attendance in full Doom regalia — brought the house down for 6,500 screaming fans. But with the online reaction to the reveal mixed, and a whole 12 hours of hindsight, it’s pretty clear that beyond a play for headlines, this is also a tacit admission on the part of Marvel that their plans post-Avengers: Endgame didn’t work.

To lay in a little more info here for those who are not chronically online, Downey Jr. will appear as Victor Von Doom, a new to the MCU character based at least in part on Marvel Comics villain Doctor Doom, in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday (aka the fifth Avengers movie), as well as Avengers: Secret Wars (aka the sixth Avengers movie). This marks the actor’s first role in the MCU since the death of Iron Man in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, which put a closer on the studio’s Infinity Saga.

In addition to Downey Jr.’s return to the universe, the pair of Avengers films are also welcoming back directors Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, aka the Russo Brothers. They previously directed Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Endgame for Marvel, and have since gone on to form their own production studio, with varying results.

One last tidbit of info here. The Hall H presentation also touted three upcoming Marvel movies: Captain America: Brave New World, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and Thunderbolts*. While the future of Captain America (Anthony Mackie) is TBA, Marvel chief Kevin Feige announced that both the casts of Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts* will appear in the upcoming Avengers movies.

Lots of info there, but it is all important to understanding this pivot point in the nearly two-decade history of Marvel Studios. After the end of Endgame, there have been successes for Marvel… But the narrative changed around the previously untouchable studio, and it’s clear that the re-casting of Downey Jr., as well as the return of the Russos, is a last-ditch attempt to get back to the glory days of 2019.

And yes, I’m aware I’m writing this as Deadpool & Wolverine delivered the biggest R-rated movie opening of all time, and the MCU — as Feige proudly announced at the beginning of the Hall H panel — is the first movie franchise to gross over $30 billion. I am very happy for this movie studio that now has a higher gross than the GDP of Iceland. Congrats.

What we’re talking about here is creative direction, and for a variety of reasons that just wasn’t working.

Part of that was the unclear flow of the overall plot starting with “Phase Four,” aka the TV shows and movies after Endgame. The goal seemed to be to deal with the hangover from Endgame in shows like WandaVision, Loki, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Meanwhile, new characters were introduced to keep the franchise trucking along without the original Avengers actors, like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, Ms. Marvel, Moon Knight, and She-Hulk.

But what it amounted to for the casual fan was “a lot of stuff.” It wasn’t as easy to keep track of multiple-week TV shows and movies, packed tight on a near bi-monthly basis over the course of a year… Versus two to three movies a year, which even at that pace was a lot for viewers mostly interested in a fun time at the movies rather than murder board-style charts of how every character is setting up a multiversal war.

There were threads there, for sure. Hints and outright references to the multiverse and Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors). Teases of connections between Ms. Marvel’s (Iman Vellani) super-powered bangles and Shang-Chi’s (Simu Liu) also otherworldly jewelry. But other times, plots seemed to directly and openly contradict what happened previously, like the extremely loose connection between Scarlet Witch’s (Elizabeth Olsen) WandaVision character arc, and how she appeared in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.

Things got worse with “Phase Five.” Secret Invasion was so long in development that Nick Fury’s (Samuel L. Jackson) status quo in that show seemed to have no connection to his direct follow-up in The Marvels. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania did well at the box office, but fans and critics cringed at the execution of Kang’s variants in the closing credits of the movie, which was meant to set up the next few years of storytelling. The doubling-down on the multiverse also caused confusion, as enough terms to fill a glossary were layered on in movies and shows: Variants, Anchor Beings, Pruning, Time Rippers, etc, etc. Easy to understand for the devoted comic book fan; less so for the casual viewer.

There were clear wins in there, too, but they started to feel like outliers. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 worked because director/writer James Gunn was allowed to end his trilogy on his own terms. This weekend’s Deadpool & Wolverine is far less about bringing the title characters into the MCU than letting stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman say goodbye to 20 years of the Fox X-Men movies — an entirely different franchise.

Did some fans love even the outright duds? Surely. Eternals, a regular source of internet mockery, has multiple fan accounts devoted to it. Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk didn’t do great on Disney+, but to some fans, that’s their favorite show. I’ll outright admit that the biggest bomb in MCU history, The Marvels, has its problems, but is also funny, fast, and has some excellent action and character dynamics.

But you can’t keep a $30 billion franchise going with 50% of the audience saying “Yeah, that was pretty good.” For a lot of viewers, Endgame was indeed the end of the story they were watching. It was a satisfying crowdpleaser of a movie that felt like a great time for the casual fan to put the book down and move on to other things.

So with pretty much everything from 2019 getting mixed reception, this Hall H presentation wasn’t so much pitching the ongoing story of the MCU, as a soft reboot back to its glory days. Enter a pair of directors who need a win as much as the studio does, and know how to wrangle big casts of superhero actors and massive plots. Enter a writer they’ve worked with previously — Stephen McFeely — the latest scribe to tackle the pair of flicks that have already cycled through multiple writers and directors. Enter Robert Downey Jr., the lynchpin of the entire MCU — its Anchor Being, if you will — without whom the whole endeavor has seemed aimless. And gone is Jonathan Majors’s Kang, replaced by a new villain who doesn’t carry the bad taste both the actor and the character now bear like an albatross.

There’s no better indication that this is a soft reboot, though than the announcement that the Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts are in both upcoming Avengers movies. While there are surely other casting announcements to come, the focus Marvel is pushing is what’s next, not what’s happened before. The term “Avengers” is now clearly being used not to describe a team called the Avengers but as a catch-all for “all the toys in the box, mashed together.” And if you didn’t like Phase Four or Phase Five? That’s okay! Hopefully, you’ll like Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts*, and then get to immediately see them in more movies! And guess what, Robert Downey Jr. is in them too! You like him, right?

It’s a gambit that will, despite online grousing, more than likely work. The casual moviegoer (remember them from earlier?) likes Robert Downey Jr. in Marvel movies. They remember that they liked at least three of the four Avengers movies. Doomsday and Secret Wars will easily make a billion dollars each. But to get there, Marvel has first had to shake their keys to distract you with what’s happening over here, so that hopefully you forget the mixed bag of movies and TV shows that came before.

And if this gambit doesn’t work? Then Marvel is, well, doomed.

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