Will Doom become the saga's main villain?

Here’s the wild truth about the villain of the Multiverse Saga: he wasn’t supposed to be the villain at all. Doctor Doom is the understudy who got handed the lead role after a very public disaster - and he may just be a better fit than the star he replaced.

The Kang problem

For years, Marvel built its entire post-Endgame strategy around Kang the Conqueror. He arrived with enormous fanfare - first as “He Who Remains” in the Loki finale, then as the main event in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which closed on the reveal of a whole council of Kang variants massing to threaten reality. The plan was transparent: Kang and his infinite selves would be the saga’s answer to Thanos, the connective thread pulling every film and show toward a grand finale titled Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.

Then it all came apart. In late 2023, actor Jonathan Majors, who played Kang, was arrested and later found guilty of assault and harassment - and Marvel fired him the same day the verdict landed. Overnight, the studio’s meticulously seeded endgame turned radioactive. You cannot build a two-film climax around a villain whose face has just become a headline for all the wrong reasons.

The scramble - and the reveal

Marvel needed a new centre of gravity, fast, and what it did next was audacious. At San Diego Comic-Con in July 2024, the studio quietly retired The Kang Dynasty, renamed its two-part finale Doomsday and Secret Wars, and unveiled the replacement in the most theatrical way imaginable: a masked figure walked on stage, removed the mask, and revealed Robert Downey Jr. as Victor von Doom. A crisis had been turned, in a single afternoon, into the boldest villain reveal in years (why RDJ?).

It’s easy to forget how risky that pivot was. Marvel had sunk years and several projects into a villain it suddenly couldn’t use, and it had to convince a fanbase already grumbling about “superhero fatigue” that the new plan wasn’t panicked improvisation. Reusing Downey was the masterstroke that sold it: instead of apologising for the change, Marvel turned it into the most-talked-about casting announcement in years and reframed the whole saga around a villain with sixty years of pedigree. The conversation flipped from “what happened to Kang?” to “wait, RDJ is Doom?” almost instantly.

Why Doom is the better fit anyway

Honestly, the accident may have upgraded the saga:

• He’s ruled reality before. In the comics, Doom doesn’t merely threaten a Secret Wars - he wins one, remaking the universe as a god (the God Emperor theory). Vanishingly few villains carry a multiverse-ending story so naturally; it’s practically his home turf.
• He needs no explaining. Kang was a hard sell - a time-travelling conqueror with infinite variants demands a lot of homework before a threat feels real. Doom is Marvel’s most iconic antagonist, full stop. “Armoured tyrant-genius who’s certain he should rule the world” lands instantly.
• The star seals it. You don’t spend Robert Downey Jr. - the actor who built the MCU - on a placeholder. His casting is Marvel screaming, in one gesture, that this is the villain.

It helps, too, to know the man behind the mask. Victor von Doom isn’t a henchman or a cosmic accident - he’s a king, the absolute ruler of the small European nation of Latveria, which he governs with terrifying competence and an iron fist. He is simultaneously one of the greatest scientific minds on the planet and a master sorcerer, a combination almost unique in Marvel. And crucially, in his own mind, Doom is the hero of the story: the only being wise and strong enough to run the universe properly, surrounded by lesser creatures too small to see his genius. That self-belief is what makes him so much scarier than a Kang. A time-travelling conqueror wants to rule for power’s sake; Doom wants to rule because he is certain he would do it better than anyone alive, and he has the intellect to very nearly prove it. Drop a character like that into a collapsing multiverse and you don’t get a villain who merely threatens the world - you get one who calmly decides to inherit it.

Is Kang gone for good?

Not necessarily erased. The multiverse is elastic, and Kang’s variants can technically still exist somewhere in the timeline - Marvel has left itself an escape hatch. But in practical terms he’s been demoted, from the threat the entire saga was building toward to a footnote overtaken by a bigger name. Doom is the mountain the finale is climbing now.

Our call: likely - all but certain. The Multiverse Saga now revolves around Doctor Doom, and after the reveal, the retitling and the casting, it’s genuinely hard to imagine it any other way. What began as damage control has become the spine of Marvel’s biggest story since Thanos.

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