There’s nothing about Victor Von Doom that screams “Robert Downey Jr.”
Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
Victor Von Doom lives in Latveria, a blighted and gothic country somewhere in remote misty-mountain Europe. He is a tyrant plotting global domination, a mad scientist scarred by his own experiments, and an evil magician with demon friends. He shares Frankenstein’s first name and lives in a Dracula-looking castle. In political terms, he’s King Putin Rasputin. None of this screams “Robert Downey Jr.”
In ten Marvel movies across 11 years, Downey played Iron Man as a chatterbox alpha-brain. “Suave dork” is a rude paradoxical phrase, but I don’t know how else to explain the beguiling charm of Tony Stark’s heinous beard. Downey embodied two unlikely fantasies: a tech CEO who’s actually as smart as he thinks he is and a rich maniac who seems to be (but isn’t) on cocaine. Wild stuff in 2008, when the most popular screen superheroes were sad X-People, an angry young Batman, and one crying Tobey. Iron Man’s best shock was how every scene with the metal suit was a little disappointing. The guy was more fun in, gasp, the conversation scenes.
It’s not that the actor hasn’t gone wicked before. He won an Oscar for embodying peevish military-industrial bureaucracy in Oppenheimer. (Idiotically, I prefer him in U.S. Marshals, a movie whose twist I just spoiled, because you need to experience the thrill of nasty young Downey betraying crusty Tommy Lee Jones.) He can nail being a nefarious jerk. Still, somewhere between Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming, Downey’s public personality took on the triple-espresso cadence of Iron Man improv, and there’s a Comic Book Guy part of me that feels Downey’s manic energy is all wrong for playing a moody despotic sorcerer. Victor Von Doom is foreign, tragic, shadowy. He loves the homeland he rules with an iron fist, seeks great power that could destroy him, and is a horrible patriarch with serious mommy issues.
But after a few rough years of box-office lows, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s new idea for how to save itself is to pair the franchise’s original star with Anthony and Joe Russo, the directors of the franchise’s biggest movies who’ve failed to make any discernible mark with post-Avengers projects. Marvel wants the glory days back. What Downey wants is … well, money, obviously. (A lot of it.) Let’s assume, though, that an actor on top of the world — who already made a Stark-size bounty during his first Marvel decade — has found some non-exclusively-financial creative spark in this new role. What brought him back?
First, let’s establish the known unknowns. What manner of Doom is Downey supposed to be? Onstage at the San Diego Comic-Con, Joe Russo introduced the actor as “the one person who could play Victor Von Doom.” Assuming nobody ever lies in a press conference, that statement forecloses the possibility that Downey’s rejoining the MCU as an alternate-reality Stark (or the original Tony resurrected). The multiverse is a landscape of endless possibility where one Captain America has the same face as one Human Torch, and yet it’d be bizarre if 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday required a scene where Doctor Strange explains to several dozen assembled superheroes that, for no reason, their new nemesis looks exactly like the world’s greatest hero.
There’s precedent for discovering evil versions of good characters, and vice versa, of course. In Marvel’s comics, there has been no shortage of evil Iron Men and good-hearted alternate-reality Dooms over the years. So I keep thinking there’s some secret behind this casting that we’re not yet seeing. Clones? Twins? On his Instagram, Downey posted a cryptic message — “New Mask, same task” — which implies some commonality between his previous and future Marvel roles.
The fact that I’m scouring Downey’s Instagram looking for clues proves this stunt casting has already succeeded as a buzz generator and PR reset. Marvel’s big plan to build its 2020s around Jonathan Majors’s Kang ran aground on real-world legal issues, not to mention the meh box-office gross of his big-screen debut in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. If the studio pivoted to Doom with any random actor of the moment — Jacob Elordi, Austin Butler, Paul Mescal — we would merely spend the next two years hoping the lucky young man gives a good performance. Downey, by contrast, brings unique elements of familiarity and mystery, nostalgia plus metamorphosis. He’s back — but for what?
In truth, it’s hard to picture any actor in the part. Legendary artist Jack Kirby designed Doom’s magnificent costume as a delirious aesthetic clash, with robotech armor shining through a wizardly medieval cloak. Classic example, I think, of an outfit that looks awesome on the page but ridiculous worn by biological humans. (The green robe cuts above his kneecaps; you’ll stumble on panels where Doctor Doom appears to be rocking a miniskirt.) Techno-magik is a complicated vibe most filmmakers don’t even try to nail. Poor Julian McMahon was a dumb-looking Doom in 2005’s Fantastic Four. Poorer Toby Kebbell looked dumber in 2015’s The Fantastic Four.
Those two flameout franchises both focused on Doom’s rivalry with his heroic ex-friend Reed Richards while mostly ignoring the gaudier aspects of his mythology (like his private kingdom, his witch mother, and his fleet of body-double robots). They didn’t delve deeply into his Romani ancestry, a cultural backdrop that has already led some Downey skeptics to level accusations of whitewashing. And they certainly did not mention that Doom might be a distant relative of Kang, a possibility that Marvel godfather Stan Lee introduced in comics way back in the ’60s. That family connection remains ambiguous, but the cynical read on Downey’s casting is that Kevin Feige and his fellow multiverse architects are simply substituting one time-traveling megalomaniac with another, dispatching Downey to take over whatever Majors would’ve been doing in the next couple Avengers movies.
The transition would allow some room for improvement. In his first Loki appearance and his shambolic Quantumania arc, Majors had to play a vaguely youthful ancient ultra-entity living outside typical definitions of space and time, surrounded by inevitable green screen, with no clear motivation beyond Cosmic Control. It’s possible to hope that Downey’s Doom will be much more tethered to a specific setting and a sharper character dynamic. It’s unclear if he’ll have a role in Fantastic Four: First Steps, but with Pedro Pascal taking on the Mr. Fantastic role in that reboot, the upcoming Marvel crossovers could revisit the Reed-Doom dynamic. (As a comparison, recall how the first Avengers used Loki’s specific enmity with his brother Thor as a springboard to his showdown against the larger team.)
2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars shares a title with a 2010s comics saga in which Doctor Doom collapses all realities into a single planet. It’s a good bet that something equivalent will happen onscreen, not least because having multiple versions of one character interacting is basically the primary Marvel Story now. (See: Deadpool & Wolverine, Loki, the most recent Spider-Men.) First will come Avengers: Doomsday, though, which will hopefully root the character within the firmament of a single timeline’s history. Latveria could exist onscreen as a kind of inverted Wakanda, another closed-off nation ruled by a techno-magical superpowered being, albeit with an upside-down moral compass. When Doctor Doom had his own futuristic solo series in the ’90s, the saga climaxed with him invading America — and conquering it.
It’s more likely, I think, that Downey’s Doom will join this franchise via one of the comic-book character’s favorite contraptions: the Time Platform. It was the villain’s first plot device, in fact, introduced way back in 1962, when he forced the Fantastic Four to travel back to the past. (He wanted them to steal Blackbeard’s treasure; do you ever miss small stakes?) Imagine the Avengers: Endgame time heist mixed with the dimension-hopping tour of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Downey-as-Doom popping up in the background of 34 films’ worth of set pieces.
Which raises the obvious question: Will Downey come face-to-face with Downey? Doctor Doom and Iron Man have interacted infrequently on the page. In the grand passage of comics time and infinite crossovers, there’s at least one version of Tony Stark who became Doctor Doom, and another incarnation of Victor Von Doom who became a Stark ally. In the 1980s, a couple semi-legendary arcs paired them up in time-traveling tales that involved the Knights of the Round Table.
It seems unlikely that multiple masked Downeys will get into sword fights with King Arthur and Blackbeard the pirate. But the most hopeful possibilities, I think, are the weirdest ones. With Oppenheimer and The Sympathizer, for which he just earned an Emmy nomination, Downey has been playing hide-and-seek with his own Tony Stark persona, retreating behind makeup and elaborate period-piece hair, making a big show of doing voices. Doctor Doom could be a similar experiment. I’m talking Downey with a thick Eurotrash accent, Downey flinging his green cape for effect. A certain buckle-down pluckiness took hold in Marvel leads a couple phases ago, with rookie stars visibly trying hard to prove how stoked they were to take on the Avengers legacy. I call this Tom Holland syndrome, due to the Homecoming star’s ever-chipper Disney Channel affect. Fair to say we can expect something different from Downey.
The actor’s original success in Iron Man depended on how effectively he rib-poked the whole notion of superhero gravitas. Could he pull a villain in the other direction, ramping up his malevolence to a Shakespearean fever pitch Marvel’s sitcom-y self-awareness usually forbids? There’s a sense that Downey is returning to a onetime all-star team grown fallow with youthful replacements, Moon Knight–ish non-icons, and too many damned Ant-people. Deadpool & Wolverine’s meta-referential ultraviolence has succeeded precisely because it’s so obviously a break from Disney-approved tradition, even as its cameos bait nostalgia for earlier Marvel incarnations. Bringing Downey back at the center of a gigantic crossover is a much riskier move into yesteryear. I hope it’s a genuinely distinctive performance, steeped in the character’s peculiar history. And if he’s just another multiverse baddie, playing 17 versions of himself, sitting in some generic TVA-ish headquarters where viewscreens play clips from past MCU films? Then, well, we’re doomed.