I wish I could’ve gone on record saying that a few years ago when we all first started experiencing the fabled “hero fatigue”.1 After RDJ left, there were maybe 2 Marvel actors with enough pull to get buts in seats. Both the Chrises, Pratt and Hemsworth (Starlord and Thor respectively). Now, I won’t go on a massive tangent, but it feels like those two characters occupy a lot of the same space these days, but frankly I haven’t watched either of their latest entries. Of course, future Tom Holland’s Spiderman is quite successful and will pull people into theatres. But, and I think it’s a very serious but, Spiderman is not part of the MCU. Obviously no one has seen the find print of the contract between Sony and Disney but Sony owns Spiderman. They have agreed to share their toys because it means more money for everyone but that money might be running out.
So, the timeline of a “Post Iron Man” Marvel Cinematic Universe.
11 total movies have come out since then and only 6 have made the “3x Profit” barrier and of course The Marvels (2023) being the biggest flop of the MCU. Despite the relative financial success, most of these movies have been rating poorly, most sitting in the 60-70 range on Metacritic.2
I try to keep in mind that I’m no longer in the audience of these movies and haven’t been for quite some time. I think i first started losing interest around Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 but came back around for the Avengers duology. Promptly checking out. There are still plenty of fans of the franchise. I haven’t talked about the TV shows and the more experimental short films (I quite liked Werewolf By Night (2022)) which find their successes and failures. Overall, I think the brand is healthy. It’s public perception not so much. The machine was running, and we were supposed to get a new Thanos and a new Avengers duology. Boy, did that not work out.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania finally revealed the new bad guy, Kang the Conqueror played by Jonathan Majors, a time traveling supervillain with an armoury of future gadgets. The time traveling makes him kinda perfect for the cycle of comics because you can pretty much always bring him back. In fact, in Quantumania, you saw a literal arena full of Kangs. This will be the last time it happens.
From March to December 2023, Majors was on trial that ended with a guilty conviction on December 18th. That same day, Marvel Studios dropped Majors completely from the project, well deserved. May he rest in piss.
Now, this is a dramatic decision in the grand timeline of the MCU films. Especially when you’re slated to release the movie in 3 years. I’d be curious to see what the original screenplay was for those movies. Doom isn’t even in the Fantastic 4, although he might be there as a post credit scene now. It’s a tight schedule for sure and a lot of money went down the drain, but the pivot to a new supervillain is totally on the table. You just have to do it right. Doom is, I believe, a fairly obvious choice. In fact, it’s weird Marvel went with Kang before Doom. I assume would’ve been the next choice.
Another benefit of Doom is that he’s a bit like Vader, masked 99.9% of the time and a fun option to filter his voice through a mask so pretty much anyone could be cast as Doom. However, in Marvel’s current position of waning interest and free-falling from their original story line? They can’t cast anyone. They gotta cast “someone”.
So in April they soft launched RDJ coming back: Robert Downey Jr. Would ‘Happily’ Return to Marvel, but His ‘Avengers’ Directors Say ‘We Closed That Book’ on Iron Man After ‘Endgame’ Death (Variety) Notice they’re saying Iron Man’s book is closed, not RDJ’s. I don’t think anyone really complained about the idea, but it’s hard to really look through it all.
Then, July 27th RDJ was announced as Dr. Doom.
Like, sure it kinda sucks that there’s no one new, and I’d rather see an eastern European actor play Doom (in fact this is probably the biggest sin) but it’s not like RDJ is a bad actor. The vast majority of responses I see are “I’m sure he’ll do fine in the roll, but why?” it excites the core marvel fans and it at least gets the MCU back in the media cycle with somewhat positive news. Here I am, a blogger with no audience talking about it.
It’s fun writing a little blog post as slow as I do because more news will probably come out but i digress:
Again, it’s just mediocre movie fatigue, but I digress.↩︎
I’m counting Deadpool and Wolverine in this as it’s listed on the Wikipedia page but this has an even more strenuous connection than Spiderman imho. It also has been killing in the box office but as of writing hasn’t broken the 3x barrier… yet.↩︎