Marvel Studios' Avengers: Doomsday is on the horizon and, soon, there will be no turning the clock back for the heroes and villains of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's the movie that the legendary franchise has been building towards all year, but in reality it is also the movie that it has been building towards since launching its Multiverse Saga back in 2021 - even if that movie has gone through some different iterations on its way to becoming Doomsday.
The upcoming MCU extravaganza will see Earth's Mightiest Heroes (which now consists of a rebuilt Avengers team from Sam Wilson's Captain America and the New Avengers led by Yelena Belova) team up with the Fantastic Four and the X-Men in a bid to do battle with the frightful Doctor Doom (Robert Downey Jr.) with the fate of the multiverse itself on the line. Yep, it's safe to say that the stakes have never been higher for the shared universe of superheroes.
However, those high stakes almost looked very different. And with the release of the new Avengers: Doomsday trailer, Marvel Studios made it official: One Multiverse Saga no longer factors into the story of this chapter.
Doctor Doom replaces Kang the Conqueror as the MCU's new big bad in Avengers: Doomsday
It's official: The Doctor will see all of us now when he takes center stage in Avengers: Doomsday. While it was already common knowledge that Robert Downey Jr. would be at the center of the MCU's upcomng phenomenon as the legendary Marvel Comics villain, the new trailer for the film has made it official: Marvel Studios has moved on from Kang the Conqueror, with Victor von Doom taking his place as the MCU's new Big Bad.
Kang was initially envisioned as the big threat at the center of the Multiverse Saga, with Jonathan Majors playing the role, but things didn't work out as planned for a multitude of reasons. The actor made his debut as an alternate version of Kang known as He Who Remains in the season 1 finale of Disney Plus' Loki, which directly set up one of the Multiverse Saga's most pivotal developments (and Loki's second season in the process). He would also play an alternate version of the character known as Victor Timely in Loki season 2, which was also well-received. However, both of those seasons were on either end of the turning point.
In 2023, Majors played a main variation of Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Although his performance was well-received, the movie was not - with a lot of criticism directed at the fact that the movie's unserious tone meant that the main villain of the Multiverse Saga was defeated by a giant ant. That ultimately rubbed a lot of the sheen off the character, who was supposed to be seen as a mesmerising, slow-burn villain.
That, coupled with Majors' own legal troubles, resulted in Marvel Studios parting ways with the actor and moving on from Kang. With that, the long-planned Avengers: The Kang Dynasty was completely rewritten, reworked, and rebooted to Avengers: Doomsday, with the studio opting to bring back long-time MCU veteran Robert Downey Jr. in the new role of Doctor Doom - presumably having the character be a doppelganger / multiversal variant of his original character Tony Stark.
While that title obviously always suggested that Doom would become the MCU's next Big Bad for both it and 2027's sequel Avengers: Secret Wars, it's still quite captivating to see how the franchise has so effortlessly shifted to a brand new villain that did not have the buildup that Kang (or Thanos before them) had. And it's certainly going to be interesting to see how the Multiverse Saga explains Kang away, and repositions Doctor Doom at the heart of the story.
The first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday made it very clear that Doctor Doom is a force to be reckoned with as it had Thor himself tell his fellow Avengers that the villain scares him. It then showed us why, as the all-powerful villain managed to block the God of Thunder's mighty axe Strombreaker with just two fingers. And then, the second trailer actually explained why he is targetting the Avengers, the multiverse, and anyone who gets in his way - showing us all that he is capable of bringing Sentinels to life with a simple touch of the ground.
It's a shame that Marvel Studios never fully capitalized on Kang the Conqueror as he was shaping up to be an interesting villain. But there is no denying that the creative team successfully reinstalled Doom as the franchise's main villain going forward in those trailers, highlighting the aura, grandeur, and pure intimidation that Victor von Doom is capable of in a mere amount of seconds.
Doom is coming, and the Multiverse Saga needs Earth's Mightiest Heroes now more than ever!
Avengers: Doomsday arrives in movie theaters on December 18, 2026.
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