byChris Hewitt|Published on26th July 2026 at 5.11pm
People:
Joseph Quinn
Ebon Moss-Bachrach
Robert Downey Jr.
Vanessa Kirby
Pedro Pascal
Kevin Feige
Anthony Russo
Joe Russo
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Doom is coming. And for everyone in the MCU — Avengers, X-Men, janitors — Robert Downey Jr’s Latverian villain is an unknown quantity, popping up out of nowhere to wreak all kinds of havoc.
Well, almost everyone. For the Avengers: Doomsday footage that screened in Hall H during the Marvel Studios presentation at Comic-Con made clear, Victor Von Doom is, indeed, an old pal of the Fantastic Four. Through the opening seconds of the trailer, which begins with a shot of Doom sitting atop a suitably ornate throne, we hear the voice of Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm describing — presumably to the FF’s new Earth-616 allies — the man they once knew. “He was always the smartest guy in the room,” she says. “He used to be different. He used to be kind. He used to be caring.”
But then a shot of Doom looking at a painting of a woman and a child (their identities, as yet, unconfirmed) triggers a change of mood. “And then everything he loved was taken from him,” continues Sue, proving that even the ruler of Latveria and potentially most powerful character in the MCU can’t prevent a good old-fashioned spot of fridging. “And he was lost. I did not realise he was broken.”
This connection between Doom was not entirely clear in the wake of last year’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, in which the good Doctor was teased (and, indeed, showed up in the post-credits sting) but not talked about overtly. Although director Matt Shakman did confirm to Empire, in our spoiler special interview, that “he is known to them. Doom, of course, has great history with Reed, and with all of them.”
So they know Doom. They know who he is, what he is. But not, perhaps, what he’s capable of. After a brief glimpse of a scene of shocking devastation in the footage, an irate Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) confronts Doom. “Victor, did you do this?” he asks, and later in the footage, we return to that moment when Mr. Fantastic faces off against Mr. Fantastically Fiendish. “Answer me, Victor — DID YOU DO THIS?”
Could it be that Doom is targeting multiversal aberrations?
The answer, it would seem, is unequivocally ‘yes’. Doom, when we meet him in Doomsday, is a seriously powerful player. It’s still not entirely clear what’s driving him in Doomsday. Is he attempting to avert an incursion that could destroy a whole bunch of universes, including the main MCU one, his own reality, and that housing the X-Men? Is he collecting power from powerful beings in order to further his ambitions? Is there something more at play here? We’ll find out soon enough, but in the footage we hear Doom — with Downey again showing not a single iota of Tony Stark in his performance — hiss, “all of you have lived stolen lives. Now you must give them back.”
As he says this, we cut between a series of major MCU characters. One of whom is Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, a time-hopping variant who quite literally is living a stolen life. Could it be that Doom is targeting multiversal aberrations? If so, then Loki might be for the chop. Again.
That will remain to be seen, of course. But Loki’s brother, Thor, is very much in Doom’s sights. In the trailer that was released earlier in the week, Thor warns his fellow Avengers (and the FF) just how powerful this new enemy is. We saw in that trailer a brief glimpse of that power, as Thor faces off against Doom. “I swear you will beg for Hell, long before I grant it,” snarls Chris Hemsworth’s God of Thunder, just before he drives down on Doom with every ounce of godlike power he can muster, Stormbreaker swinging down on Doom’s head with great vengeance and furious anger… until it isn’t, Doom stopping the blow with just two fingers.
In the Hall H footage, we see a little more, with Doom repelling Thor with an energy blast. And then comes the money shot, the image that shows that Doom is not mucking about. “Hell,” he retorts, “answers to me.” And he proves it by using his prodigious magic skills (eat your heart out, Penn & Teller) to raise, seemingly from the dead, a small army of Sentinels. Thor is going to need some serious back-up. And, perhaps, some new pants. We’ll find out on December 18.
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