Doctor Doom will soon arrive in the MCU. Really, really soon. After Thunderbolts* there’s only one movie left, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, before Robert Downey Jr. returns to the franchise in Avengers: Doomsday. Did the Thunderbolts* feature the iconic Marvel Comics villain? Did it begin laying the groundwork for his arrival in anyway? Here’s how the MCU might have officially begun the countdown to Doom.
Thunderbolts* never even hinted at, let alone connected to, the coming arrival of Victor von Doom. Not until the absolute last moment. During the film’s final post-credits scene set 14 months later—one of the most important post-credits scene in MCU history—the new Avengers made reference to a “huge space crisis.” What exactly is happening in outer space? Despite working with CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, no one is letting the New Avengers in on this crisis. They have no idea what is going on.
Bucky and Yelenda weren’t interested in rebranding as the “Avengerz.” Instead they focused on doing their own reconnaissance. Yelena ran a full “threat analysis” of space and it alerted them to an “unidentified craft entering orbit.” She then got the team’s jets ready as she pulled up a satellite image. Their scan labeled the object as “an extradimensional ship.” That ship from a parallel universe belongs to the Fantastic Four, who formally arrived in Earth-616’s dimension.
The introduction of the Fantastic Four into the MCU’s prime universe points to the most likely explanation of the huge space crisis facing Earth. It points to an incursion.
The threat of incursions have been hovering over the franchise since Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. John Krasinski’s Mister Fantastic, the first Variant of Reed Richards to appear in the MCU, explained this horrible interdimensional catastrophe to Stephen Strange. An incursion is “when the boundary between two universes erodes and they collide, destroying one or both entirely.”
Multiple Doctor Strange Variants had caused incursions, killing billions. During an end-credits scene Charlize Theron’s Clea showed up on Earth-616 to recruit Strange to help stop an impending incursion he had begun.
In Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Kang also talked about how his Variants’ multiversal war with one another (a battle He Who Remains talked about in Loki‘s season one finale) led to “universes colliding” and “endless incursions.”
A post-credits scene from The Marvels also showed where Monica Rambeau ended up after she closed a rip in the multiverse. She awoke in a world where the X-Men exist. While a few mutants have appeared in the franchise, they are poised to make their MCU presence truly felt in Avengers: Doomsday and almost certainly in Avengers: Secret Wars, a comic arc about multiversal battles and incursions.
Victor von Doom is coming. When he does, he will pit super beings from different dimensions against one another. Like the Fantastic Four (who we might ultimately learn survived the destruction of their own dimension), Doom’s mere arrival from a parallel universe could create the threat of an incursion. He might even intentionally try to create one. He’s the kind of existential dangers confused governments of the world would try to keep secret even from both Avengers and Avengerz alike.
How, why, and when Doctor Doom is coming to Earth-616 remains unknown. But his arrival will definitely qualify as a “huge space crisis.”
Content shared from nerdist.com.