This July marks two years since Robert Downey Jr. made a dramatic entrance at Marvel Studios’ San Diego Comic-Con panel to reveal that he was returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe—but not as Tony Stark. Instead, he revealed that he would be playing iconic Marvel villain Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, which was a casting shock as brilliant as it was perplexing. How are they going to explain how the guy who played Iron Man is now Doctor Doom? Well, we still don’t know, but that doesn’t mean Doom has been idly chilling in his castle for the last few years. He’s actually been pretty busy… but only in Marvel’s comic books.
In what seems like an odd bit of mistimed synergy, Marvel Comics’ big yearlong event in 2025 was “One World Under Doom,” a story in which Doom took over the title of Sorcerer Supreme and effectively achieved his dream of conquering the world. It was a fun event, led by writer Ryan North and artist R.B. Silva, with juicy stuff for a lot of classic Marvel characters (the Fantastic Four, obviously, but also Alpha Flight, the Masters of Evil, and the Living Tribunal), but its definitive ending came a whole year before Avengers: Doomsday is set to finally open. That means anyone leaving the theater in December who is hoping to get into floppy comic books will be a year late for Doom’s biggest showcase since Secret Wars in 2015. However, strict synergy between the MCU and the comics has always been a poisoned chalice, so that disconnect is actually better for everyone involved.
Doomsday is going to be a long-awaited team-up for the Fantastic Four, Avengers, Thunderbolts/New Avengers, X-Men, and the Wakandans, but the MCU wasn’t always so open to that level of unity. Before Disney bought 20th Century Fox in 2019 and took over the movie rights to the X-Men, it tried to push a Royal Crown Cola-style alternative in the form of the Inhumans—a significantly less popular group of super-powered individuals from the comics who were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the ‘60s. Marvel Studios tried to get an Inhumans movie off the ground for years before ultimately dumping the concept into a mercifully short-lived ABC TV series, but more damage was done in the comics.
In 2014, as noted by MovieWeb, beloved X-Men writer Chris Claremont claimed that, since Fox held the X-Men movie rights, any new character introduced in X-Men comics would be Fox’s property and not Disney’s. So, with no way to get any of that hot MCU cash with mutants, Marvel’s CEO at the time, Ike Perlmutter, supposedly declared that the X-Men were over and that the Inhumans were going to replace them. In fact, the “Infinity” crossover event from a year earlier involved the detonation of a “Terrigen Bomb” that triggered the development of Inhuman superpowers in regular humans but was poisonous to mutants. In other words, the Marvel universe literally became toxic to the X-Men.
Then came a lengthy period in which X-Men characters were sidelined, having been left out of cartoons and video games along with a significant reduction in X-Men merchandise. And, since the 2017 Inhumans TV show was a disaster, it was all basically done for no reason. Marvel fans didn’t get a cool new super-group to root for, they just lost the one that everybody already liked, all so Marvel wouldn’t have to promote characters whose movie rights were owned by a different company. A more dramatic version of this had also happened to the Fantastic Four a few years earlier in the aforementioned Secret Wars event, which gave the FF a nice send-off but ended with them being ejected from the canonical Marvel Comics universe entirely and then ignored for any and all Marvel merchandise (just in time for 2015’s bad Fantastic Four movie, which was, of course, released by Fox and not Disney).
The MCU has never strictly adhered to comic canon, and things almost always work out for the better because of that. Iron Man’s perspective doesn’t really make sense in the Civil War comic, but the movie wisely made it a more personal story about the death of his parents. Basically nothing about Tom Holland’s Spider-Man has been strictly lifted from the comics. And, speaking of Thanos, his whole “perfectly balanced, as all things should be” motivation was invented for the MCU. It’s also worth noting that, despite the guy who played Iron Man playing Doctor Doom, Doomsday doesn’t seem like it’s going to have anything to do with Infamous Iron Man, the 2016 series that involved Doom becoming the new Iron Man.
At the same time, the comics have rarely stuck too close to what’s happening onscreen. For example, recent Avengers teams have had Blade but not Steve Rogers; Daredevil hasn’t been a practicing defense attorney for years, unlike on his Disney+ show; and the Gorr the God Butcher saga was actually awesome in the comics, instead of being whatever Thor: Love And Thunder did with it. On top of that, Marvel’s best-selling comics from last year were completely detached from the MCU: Number one was the Deadpool/Batman crossover (a thing that will never, ever, ever happen in live-action), and number two was the first issue of Ultimate Wolverine (an alternate universe version of a character whose only MCU appearance has been in the debatably canonical Deadpool & Wolverine).
It may seem counterintuitive, or like a waste of one of the most powerful entertainment monoliths in the world, but the two main branches of Marvel storytelling seem to be getting by just fine without overtly copying the other. So if the MCU missed Doctor Doom’s big moment, it was for the best. Now the movies can—hopefully—put together a big moment of their own that best serves the big-screen version of Doom.
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