Doctor Doom is the evil shadow of Iron Man? The most popular fan theories about Avengers: Doomsday | film

WWith its enigmatic trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel has perfected the trailer that reveals nothing in particular. Teasers consist of foreboding glances, moody lighting, and characters standing still. Dialogue is pre-cleaned of context. The music swells with confidence that something tremendous is happening outside the frame. Meanwhile, the plot was placed in witness protection. The studio is clearly well aware that giving away even a few details this early — the film isn’t scheduled to be released until December — will result in fans cracking the code long before any stragglers get into the seats.

After all, Marvel has been here before. The Avengers: Infinity War trailers laid enough narrative scaffolding for the Internet to quietly conclude, months ago, that Thanos would win and leave the universe in tatters. It happened again with Avengers: Endgame, a film whose story was drawn from toy leaks, casting announcements, and the extreme view that actors rarely sign multi-picture deals only to have their characters die forever.

Which makes it even more impressive that Doomsday was about to join the roster this week. The Russo brothers, who have returned to Marvel to direct the next two Avengers films, have decided to launch a section on their website dedicated to collective speculation about Doomsday. But no sooner had it been unveiled — along with an accompanying video highlighting the wilder plot ideas — than the entire project was wiped clean. Did someone guess the whole thing? If so, they couldn’t have prepared much for the following far-fetched fan theories currently roaming the uncensored corners of the internet.

Doctor Doom is basically Tony Stark’s evil shadow
The most disturbed (and therefore most popular) version of this theory suggests that Avengers: Doomsday will open by presenting Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom not as a villain at all, but as a heroic solution to the problem of the multiverse. Downey-Doom is instinctively trustworthy because he has the face of Tony Stark, and because we’ve all spent the better part of the past two decades conditioning to believe that the man wearing him will build a machine that saves everyone at the last possible second. It’s unfortunate that he would use that trust to stabilize Earth-616 according to his own principles, which would probably include him sitting atop a giant throne looking down on everyone else in the known universe.

Steve Rogers The universe breaks down by cooling
The idea here is that Steve Rogers’ decision to live a full, peaceful life after returning the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame not only broke the rules of time, he broke them in half. The theory is that Rogers’ choice to remain in the past—marrying Peggy Carter, growing old, and experiencing the kind of wholesome domestic bliss usually reserved for Christmas advertisements—created a branching timeline so unstable that it began to quietly leak chaos into the rest of existence.

Doom is hunting down Cap’s child along with everyone else’s children
An extension of the above – and one that was clearly floated before the Russo brothers’ fan theory video disappeared – it posits that Steve Rogers fathered a child whose very existence destabilizes the multiverse. Doctor Doom’s mission, according to this theory, is to find the Child and remove him from the timeline with extreme prejudice. The problem, as fans are happy to point out, is that this market is already crowded. The Marvel Universe currently has at least one other small, alarmingly powerful frog in the form of Franklin Richards. If Doom is in the business of hunting multiverse-breaking brats, he’s spoiled for choice. Chris Hemsworth’s Thor spends much of his bizarre teaser speaking in solemn tones about legacy, his daughter’s future, and what comes after the gods, which has fans wondering whether Doomsday will be less of an Avengers movie and more of a grim hunt for whatever superhero offspring happens to be vibrating on the wrong frequency. Does this mean that Doom is, in some weird way, really as heroic as Stark ever was?

The X-Men arrive via chaos, not introduction

Instead of the mutants debuting in a neat origin story, some fans believe Doomsday will use the instability of the multiverse to retroactively introduce the X-Men. In this reading, Professor Less introduction, more just an administrative correction.

The film ends with the MCU itself being deleted
It seems like there have been at least a few high-flying hits for Marvel, and thanks to all those Disney+ spin-offs, the universe has become too narratively crowded to run. So the only solution is to shut everything down and start over, according to the most audacious and horrific theory going around: that Avengers: Doomsday not only ends the story, but quietly deletes the Marvel Cinematic Universe altogether. Not an explosion, or a sacrifice, but a kind of cosmic factory reset.

Fans pushing this theory frame it as Marvel admitting defeat in its long war against the narrative bloat it has spent 18 years proudly accumulating. Judgment Day, in this reading, becomes a controlled process of demolition, removing variables, loose ends, and characters who are technically dead but may still be alive elsewhere, in order to relaunch the entire project with fewer explanations. The reality will then be rebooted (most likely via Avengers: Secret Wars) with the vague promise that this time no one will kill off the main character and bring them back as the next movie’s villain.