One Mind Blowing Secret From Every MCU Movie
14. A Doom Reference That Never Was - Black Widow
One of the great things about Avengers: Infinity War was that there had been teases for the story sprinkled throughout the previous 18 films, be that in the form of Thanos himself, or the Infinity Stones he so coveted. Other than The Fantastic Four: First Steps' post-credit scene, the same cannot be said for Doctor Doom.
Of course, the initial plans did not involve the villain, and from just Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Loki alone, audiences would have known plenty about Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) long before he was set to face off with the Avengers in Kang Dynasty.
Doom has not been able to enjoy a similar build outside of his appearance in the First Steps post-credit scene. The closest tease other than this ironically came long before the character was even announced. When Black Widow was in production, Kang was still very much the plan moving forward, but that didn't stop Eric Pearson from trying to get Doom's home of Latveria into his script somewhere.
Realistically, this wouldn't have had anything at all to do with the story of Black Widow, and at the time would have been nothing but an Easter egg rather than a breadcrumb to a larger story. However, go back to Iron Man 2 and recall the excitement of seeing Wakanda on a map behind Tony Stark. This could have been the kind of good old-fashioned nod to the comics that the MCU has arguably been missing over the last few years.