Getting ready for Doomsday
Secret Wars is being done right. FINALLY. That’s because Doctor Doom is officially in the MCU now, and it shook the very core of the movie franchise.
BUT FIRST!
Marvel took on SDCC in a proper return, dropping major announcements and reveals. The Disney-owned company started the festivities with Captain America: Brave New World, bringing in Harrison Ford and squad to discuss the film. Ford will play the role of President Thaddeus Ross, who becomes Red Hulk in the film (sorry, Marvel spoiled it first). Anthony Mackie’s Captain America is stuck between a rock and a hard place, whether to help the President take down the Serpent Society (and Giancarlo Esposito’s Sidewinder) or to support an increasingly corrupt leader. It will also address the Celestial that’s stuck in the ocean, hinting that it’s where Adamantium(!) comes from. LET’S GO!
The producers noted that the film is more in line with Winter Soldier than in the wild CGI-filled worlds of the recent Marvel outings, becoming much more grounded. It lands in theaters in February 2025.
Then, it was time for THUNDERBOLTS*. And yes, that asterisk/star is officially a part of the logo now. The film is a sort of Marvel take on Suicide Squad, which was a sort of DC take on Guardians of the Galaxy. Life is a circle. Anyhoo, the team assembled on stage, lead by Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina (the character who put together the bad-good team) and starring Florence Pugh as White Widow, Sebastian Stan as Winter Soldier, and David Harbour as Red Guardian, among other returning characters. The film lands on May 2, 2025.
The Fantastic Four were up next, and revealed that the film takes place in a retro-futuristic 1960s with influences by artists and designers like the legendary Syd Mead. Starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Marvel’s first family, it will also include Ralph Ineson as Galactus and Julia Garner as Silver Surfer. A special thematic clip shared at Hall C includes references to the Multiverse, heavily indicating what we’ve felt all along in that the film takes place on an alternate Earth outside of the Sacred Timeline. The film is officially titled Fantastic Four: First Steps and will hit theaters on July 25, 2025.
But everything changed when the next set of announcements took place. First, the Russo brothers were brought onstage to officially announce that they were taking on the next two Avengers films. Avengers: Secret Wars is arriving in May 2027, and is (likely) going to be the biggest Marvel movie of all time, bringing characters from across the multiverse together in an epic battle bigger than Endgame. It’s been the dream project for the Russos, and will help clean up the mess of the history all of the Marvel movies. We would expect several versions of Spider-man, Deadpool, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers and more to hit the screen and help that Sacred Timeline finally get cleaned up as everything sort of merges together. Secret Wars hits theaters in May 2027.
Before then, though, the Russos announced that the next Avengers film is going to shake everything up. Fans of Marvel comics know that Secret Wars cannot take place without one pivotal character (and my favorite Marvel villain of all time): Doctor Doom. And so, the next film needs to be Avengers: DOOMSDAY. While the company was building up Kang to be the next Big Bad in the MCU, that fizzled out because of A) Jonathan Majors abuse convictions, and B) the multiverse was stinking up plot lines and hard to follow. It just wasn’t fun for new fans, and old fans were kind of getting tired of the MCU’s B.S. post-Endgame. So, something needed to happen. Thankfully Doom is the perfect pivot, and has been rumored for a while now to take the reigns of the MCU’s future. Doom is heavily tied into the Fantastic Four, and Kang is a future variant of the Richards family, so it all kind of works. We’re just curious about how they’re going to clean up the Kang stuff by then. Will Doom be a variant? Or will he be found to have destroyed all the Kangs somehow? May 2026 for that film.
But hey, who is gonna play Doom in the films? Well, it’s none other than…
ROBERT DOWNEY JR.
Internet discourse aside, RDJ taking on the role is circularly perfect. Not only is he the smartest man alive (or, was) in the MCU, and he was almost led to corruption a few times, but it’s an easy layup to have him actually become corrupt with power in an alternate timeline. Plus, with the first big story of the MCU starting and ending with RDJ’s Tony Stark as the ultimate hero, it kind of feels right to have him start and end this second story as the the ultimate enemy.
Comic books are great for this, and that’s why we love them so much.
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