Avengers: Doomsday - Who Doctor Doom Is (& Why He's Marvel's BEST Villain)

Doctor Doom is Marvel's greatest comic book supervillain - potentially, depending on who you ask, their greatest character full-stop - and yet, if you took a look back on the past 20-or-so years of the House of Ideas' on-screen history, you wouldn't really know it.

Courtesy of two rather insipid big-screen adaptations of the Fantastic Four from 20th Century Fox in the mid-2000s and 2010s - the first of which portrayed Doom as a sauceless billionaire and the latter as an animated crash-test dummy - Doom has fallen behind his fellow Marvel rogues in terms of notoriety and stature. Ask the average Marvel fan who the greatest villain in the company's history is today, and they're much more likely to say Loki than they are the metal-clad dictator of Latveria.

It's a perception that clashes heavily with the published history of Doctor Doom the character - a complex sorcerer-scientist defined as much by his ego as he is a bitter rivalry with Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. In his time, Doom has brought the world to its knees, reshaped the multiverse in his own image, and even, at one point, tried to atone for his sins as a hero in the pages of Infamous Iron Man. (He looked especially cool in that last one.)

In short, there is no Marvel villain with as storied a history as Victor von Doom, and it's that baggage Marvel Studios is looking to wield with its latest Avengers film, Avengers: Doomsday, which at the time of writing has just seen its first big trailer get released. Joe and Anthony Russo's Marvel homecoming seems to be drawing heavily from Jonathan Hickman's epic work on Fantastic Four and The Avengers, which culminated in the multiverse-shattering event crossover Secret Wars in 2015 - a comic that also represented the culmination of over a decade's worth of storytelling from Hickman across FF and Avengers. Central to this arc was Doom's rivalry with Mister Fantastic, with the final pages of Secret Wars bringing cathartic closure to one of the most enduring feuds the superhero genre has ever seen.

Hickman's Marvel work has already proven a rich vein to mine for the MCU. The Russos and their screenwriting partners Christopher Marcus and Stephen McFeely drew heavily from Hickman's Infinity arc on Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, and with Doomsday intended as a ressuciative moment for the Marvel brand at large, it's no surprise that, along with Chrises Hemsworth and Evans, Robert Downey Jr. and co., Hickman's stories are too once again being fed through the Marvel Studios meatgrinder - with Doom the most unfortunate potential casualty; an icon eclipsed by iconicity, subsumed into the metanarrative of RDJ's return, and untethered to the Fantastic Four.

In other words, a very un-Doom-like portrayal. Although it must be said that the first trailer we've seen with Doom in the driver's seat, Downey appears to be giving it both barrels. The accent is there, the costume is spot-on - avoid any pitfalls with variants and the like, and it may just be enough to overcome the lack of build-up to a moment as climactic as Secret Wars come next year.

But who is Doctor Doom exactly? Why is he being spoken about in the Avengers: Doomsday trailer like he's the scariest guy Thor's ever seen? And can the Russos really provide a just adaptation of a legendary character without any buildup and with a shocking piece of stunt casting to boot? Let's get into it.