The future of the MCU is looking a little hazy lately. Marvel’s Multiverse Saga already faced trouble stemming from actor Jonathan Majors’ domestic violence trial. Now, between the historically low box office for The Marvels and the fact that Avengers: The Kang Dynasty has lost director Destin Daniel Cretton, it’s beginning to look as though Marvel Studios is stepping back and pivoting in a new direction.
Some fans are suggesting that now is the time to move away from Kang and instead position Doctor Doom as the overarching villain of the Multiverse Saga. But while placing Doom at the center of Avengers: Secret Wars makes sense, there’s no way that shake-up will suddenly fix all of the MCU’s woes. Let’s explore why the MCU’s problems run deeper than a single villain, and why Doom isn’t necessarily the villain we need right now.
Can Doctor Doom Replace Kang?
On the surface, it makes sense to pivot from Kang to Doctor Doom as the focus of the Multiverse Saga. After all, Doom is the central villain and the single most important character in 2015’s Secret Wars. That series is built around the idea of Doom becoming the savior of existence and crowning himself the God Emperor of Battleworld, the hodgepodge realm that exists after the multiverse is obliterated. If anything, it was a little strange when Marvel originally announced Avengers: Secret Wars with no mention of Doom himself. How do you tell that story without Marvel’s most megalomaniacal villain at the helm?
Let’s not forget, however, that Marvel Studios has a habit of diverging from the source material in significant ways. Captain America: Civil War is missing many key players from the Civil War comic. Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame loosely adapted The Infinity Gauntlet yet left out some of the most important heroes from the comic like Adam Warlock and Silver Surfer. Just because a character is integral to a Marvel Comics storyline doesn’t mean they will or even should be used in the MCU version. Infinity War is easily among the MCU’s best films, and it didn’t exactly suffer from a lack of Silver Surfer.
Similarly, Avengers: Secret Wars doesn’t inherently need Doctor Doom to succeed. It can rewrite the source material so that Kang replaces Doom as the hyper-arrogant tyrant at the center of Battleworld. But if Marvel really is moving away from Kang going forward, doesn’t that make Doom the logical replacement?
Not necessarily. The problem with the Secret Wars comic is that it exists as the final chapter in writer Jonathan Hickman’s much larger body of work on the Fantastic Four and Avengers titles. Hickman’s Secret Wars is a Fantastic Four story at heart, and one that plays very heavily with the twisted relationship between Doom and Reed Richards. Its emotional ending is all the more powerful because it builds on decades’ worth of Doctor Doom stories in a moment of ultimate redemption.
Crafting a Secret Wars movie that adheres closely to the comics requires a certain amount of legwork the MCU hasn’t had an opportunity to do yet. It needs Doom to be a fully realized character coming into Secret Wars. It requires that audiences understand the rivalry between Reed Richards and Victor von Doom and the way Doom covets the family his rival has built. Doom is a tough character to get right, because there’s a lot of complexity and nuance beneath the bravado and armored exterior. The MCU has its work cut out for it.
The question is whether the Multiverse Saga even has time to flesh out Doctor Doom before the next Avengers duology comes along. Yes, there’s a Fantastic Four movie currently slated for 2025, but we don’t even know what, if any, role Doom will play in the film. Current rumors suggest the new movie is focused on Galactus, not Doom. Barring the surprise announcement of a Doom series on Disney+ or the revival of Noah Hawley’s scrapped Doctor Doom movie, it’s hard to see how the MCU can properly establish such an important character before the next Avengers movies.
The MCU’s Lack of Focus
None of this is to say Doctor Doom absolutely couldn’t work as the new villain of the Multiverse Saga. We have no idea just how dramatically Marvel is working to reshape its current slate or whether Kang is fully out of the picture now. If Doom does end up headlining the Fantastic Four movie and appearing in other projects like Thunderbolts, then maybe he will be in a great position to become the next great Avengers villain. But all of that requires something that’s been sorely lacking in the MCU lately - focus.
Ultimately, the MCU’s current problems run deeper than any one particular villain. There doesn’t seem to be much focus in the post-Endgame lineup. So many MCU projects have been dedicated to introducing new heroes and villains - Yelena Belova, She-Hulk, Kate Bishop, Moon Knight, etc. Comparatively few movies and shows have really pushed the larger MCU narrative forward.
It’s mostly fallen on Loki to lay out the scope of the multiverse and the threat posed by the many variants of Kang. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania didn’t exactly establish Kang as the next Thanos-level threat. Secret Invasion halfheartedly sets up a new running storyline involving anti-alien paranoia, but that loose end has yet to be picked up in another MCU project. The Marvels doesn’t even seem to acknowledge the existence of that Nick Fury-centric series. And don’t even get us started on Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, a character who’s been appearing everywhere yet whose actual purpose is still up in the air.
We’re well into Phase 5 now, and the MCU has introduced many new pieces on the board without doing much to explain how they all fit together. There’s little sense of where everything is building to right now, apart from the subplot involving incursions that’s played out in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and The Marvels. There are hints that new MCU artifacts like the Ten Rings and Ms. Marvel’s bangles are somehow connected, but hints are all they are. Where do all of these disparate elements - the incursions, the Council of Kangs, the new weapons, the anti-alien paranoia, the rise of Contessa - actually fit together?
By comparison, The Infinity Saga was far neater and more focused in its buildup. The Avengers teased a much larger conflict with the debut of Thanos in its post-credits scene. From there, the MCU was focused on two fronts - introducing more of the Infinity Stones and maneuvering the Avengers so that they’d be scattered and divided when Thanos finally came calling. That twin build-up paid off handsomely in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame.
The Multiverse Saga suffers from a much less clean and focused sense of progression. Again, there have been a number of running plot threads and new characters introduced in Phases 4 and 5, but it doesn’t add up to a clear endpoint for Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars. And simply switching the focus from Kang to Doom will do nothing to address this fundamental problem with the MCU’s post-Endgame slate.
It remains to be seen just how drastically Marvel will pivot over the next few years. Will they simply recast Kang and continue the march toward The Kang Dynasty? Will they pivot to Doom and attempt a more comics-accurate version of Secret Wars? Will they scrap the Multiverse Saga entirely and focus on something new? It’s too early to tell. But whatever happens, it’s clear Marvel needs to return to the leaner, meaner approach of the Infinity Saga. The focus now needs to be less on introducing new characters and elements and more on building more connective tissue and a greater sense of focus in the MCU. Marvel fans need to know where all of this is leading, or else the poor box office performance of The Marvels may be a harbinger of things to come for Disney.
For more on the future of the MCU, read our full breakdown of the ending to The Marvels and see all the Marvel movies and shows in development.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
