It seems highly unlikely in my lifetime.
At comic-con and Hall H during a Marvel cinematic universe symposium, they made a dramatic reveal of Robert Downey Jr. coming out in a Dr. doom mask and revealing himself to rousing applause. of course, if you were just to cut a loud smelly fart in Hall H you would probably get big applause. Anyway, I found this quite cringe worthy and I will tell you why.
This is clearly a desperation move by Disney to generate some interest for Upcoming avengers movies that are going to be featuring characters from failed films and TV shows of the last few years. They needed to replace the woman beater who is playing Kang in various movies and shows and who was going to be the big bad in the upcoming projects. Personally, I always found Kang to be kind of weak sauce as far as a cinematic villain. Or comic villain. In general Dr. doom sounds like a far more interesting villain, and the reports about the upcoming Fantastic Four film despite Pedro Pascal being wildly miscast as Reed Richards Sounds pretty good.
But besides the Downey desperation move the fact that he already has been the flagship actor playing the flagship character in the more successful phases of the marvel cinematic universe makes this a baffling decision. So what are we going to get? Is he going to be an evil universe version of Tony Stark? or is he going to play Victor Von as essentially a completely different character and the plan is to make him look as different from Tony Stark and sound as different from Tony Stark as they possibly can. Neither of these sound like acceptable things to me.
I was an avid comic book collector from around the age of seven years old when my parents first brought a stack of comics from a swap meet to when I was around 25 years old and had decided that three dollars or more was far too much to pay for what amounted to less than 30 pages of comic book panels. On the face of it a single comic that doesn’t sound that bad but I was a type of person that would go every couple weeks and get a nice stack of about a dozen or more comics. dr. doom was just about my favorite villain. The arrogance and capability. The fact that he was a scientist and also a magician who every year on all hallows Eve did rituals to try to fight demons through a portal to hell to release his mothers gypsy soul from torment. and that time the fantastic four went to Latveria to confront doom and found it all messed up from their previous visits. They had left the place in a state of Apocalypse and the people were looking to Dr. doom as their rightful heir and savior and them as the enemy. This was just amazing stuff that you just can’t find in the comics today.
I remember at some point my mid teens, me and a couple of friends would sit around pretending to be our favorite comic book villains, and arguing about the events of the day. One friend was the red skull doing a German accent. Another one was Ultron doing a robot voice. and I of course, was Dr. doom.
My only real hope is what I mentioned above the possibility that Robert Downey Jr. will be trying to go through some kind of acting transformation to be a completely different character other than Tony Stark. But that level of thespianism just doesn’t seem to be his bag. He seems to be at his best when he’s all snarky and snippy. But I would like him to prove me wrong.
I don’t collect comics anymore and in all honesty the last year or so I’ve been slowly trying to drizzle them away through eBay. I still have some decent old comic runs that at times seemed quite valuable. But my most valuable comics I had sold off and made thousands of dollars around the time eBay first came around. nowadays, people just aren’t paying as much money for the good stuff. but I still have emotional attachments to a lot of the stuff, and I found the marvel cinematic universe has given me just as many painful moments as it has great joys. And the painful stuff is deadened by the fact that it’s usually characters I never cared much about anyway. The comic versions of Captain Marvel and Modoc and others never mattered much to me. At least, and they’re more modern iterations.
(spoilers for Deadpool and wolverine below)
But I think there is more pain to come than joys. But this last weekend I saw Deadpool and Wolverine and I found a lot of joy in there. Wesley Snipes Blade and Chris Evans Human torch. The original X-Men films, actors and characters like sabertooth and toad. Those really tickled my nostalgia bone.
I guess I’m just going to have to see. These next avenger movies are years away and aren’t really gonna be filled with characters I care much about. so I’ve mostly checked out emotionally from these films. But Deadpool and Wolverine really ignited the nostalgia in me. So who knows?
