How Marvel deals with Doctor Doom is make or break for the MCU. No one wants a watered-down Tony Stark

The hooded supervillain is a scientist, a sorcerer, a monarch and a mummy’s boy – Robert Downey Jr’s Doom should be all these things and more, radiating history, magic and the biggest ego

T he problem with building the next stage of your superhero franchise around Doctor Doom is that nobody really knows if he is Marvel’s Darth Vader, or just the guy from those terrible 20th Century Fox films. We wouldn’t even be getting Doom in the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday if Marvel’s original post-Thanos masterplan had not collapsed when Jonathan Majors, who played Kang, was dropped from the franchise . And we don’t really know if the subsequent casting of Robert Downey Jr (previously Marvel’s Iron Man) in the role is some kind of ingenious masterstroke that will all make sense when we finally see the finished film, or just an expensive nostalgia panic button.

The stakes are so high here that the geekosphere is delving into every possible clue, no matter how fleeting, as to which version of Doom we might be getting in the film. Will this be a flamboyant, comics-accurate take on the Latverian dictator? Or will Marvel dip into the multiverse of convenience and deliver an iteration that is little more than Tony Stark in eastern Europe?

Nobody knows, and the success or failure of this next superhero extravaganza might well decide the future of the entire franchise, which is probably why everyone is clutching desperately at straws. Some reports this week have suggested that the existence of a Doctor Doom coffee shop at Marvel’s recent SXSW London pop-up is good reason to expect that we’ll be getting a version of the supervillain straight out of the comics.

Are we reading too much into this stuff? Quite possibly. But keen sleuths have already decided that because the menu appears to reference Doom’s mother Cynthia, the Romani clan from which Doom descends in the comics (the Zefiro) and the Latverian dictator King Vladimir Fortunov (whose throne the villain ultimately steals), this means Marvel may be planning to give us the full operatic Doom origin story once seen in print, rather than a bland, modernised take. The fact that the Russo brothers actually turned up to preside over the lattes suggests at the very least that someone at Marvel is feeding out these hints deliberately.

Quite what we are to make of the Avengers: Doomsday directors’ non-committal comments at a separate SXSW panel is another matter entirely. “Part of our challenge has always been that there’s something that we love from the comics, and there’s something that you know other fans of the comics love. Sometimes those things are the same thing, sometimes they’re different things,” said Joe Russo during the panel. “A lot of times, what our expression in the movie ends up being is what we love most about the comics, but then what is original to our storytelling, what is brand-new – because we always look at it as our job to not tell you a story that you’ve heard before. We’re never translating directly from the comics, we’re always adding a new experience that hasn’t been written yet in terms of who these characters can be.”

He added: “But I would say Doom hits that sweet spot between being very specific and unique to the original story that happens within this film, but also delivering on what the most awesome things are about Doom in the comics.”

The mixed picture here tracks with reports of recent trailer footage shown at CinemaCon, which suggested Downey Jr’s Doom comes with a hood, mask and voice distinct from Iron Man’s, yet gave little else away. If this new version of the armoured despot really is comics-accurate, this suggests that the universe in which we first met him, during the mid credits scene in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, tends towards traditional Silver Age Marvel storytelling.