Avengers: Doomsday Casting Suggests Several Possible Marvel Storylines

Will "Avengers: Doomsday" have room for Doctor Victor von Doom (Robert Downey Jr.) himself? The film's casting announcement confirmed not only many MCU regulars but also the cast of the forthcoming "Fantastic Four: First Steps" and several returning faces from the 20th Century Fox "X-Men" films. Some major Marvel character absences suggest this may not even be the whole cast.

"Doomsday" is going to be a two-part film, like the last "Avengers" duology, "Infinity War" and "Endgame." We can guess pretty concretely what "Secret Wars" will be: Doom will achieve godly power and rule over a realm called Battleworld. In broad strokes, that's what both the original 1984 "Secret Wars" (by Jim Shooter, Mike Zeck, and Bob Layton) and the 2015 one (by Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic) are about.

But "Doomsday" is less easy to predict. Beyond it introducing Doom, and presumably setting the stage for "Secret Wars," other plot details are not quite clear. Now, there was quite a bit of build-up to the 2015 "Secret Wars." Hickman spent three years writing "Avengers" and "New Avengers" in tandem with one primary thread: the Multiverse was collapsing in events called Incursions, where two Earths merge and, unless one is destroyed, collide in mutual destruction.

Hickman's "Avengers" was about different groups working to try and stop the Incursions. The superheroes in the Illuminati slowly discovered there was no ethical way out of omnicide, Thanos' Cabal happily slaughtered world after world to preemptively stop Incursions, and alien women called "Black Swans" visited worlds during Incursions, spreading word of a "great destroyer," Rabum Alal.

Alal was eventually revealed to be Doom, and his alias was a misnomer: he was trying to preserve as much of reality as he could, not destroy it. How much of this will the MCU adapt? Probably little, but some films in the "Multiverse Saga" (such as "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness") have mentioned the idea of Incursions. I would not be surprised if "Avengers: Doomsday" ends on a cliffhanger of an Incursion destroying the MCU's "Sacred Timeline," leading into a Doom-ruled Battleworld.

What story can lead to that point, and how does the film's confirmed cast hint at it?

There's about as many X-Men characters in "Doomsday" as there are "Avengers" ones: Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen), Cyclops (James Marsden), Beast (Kelsey Grammer), Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), and Gambit (Channing Tatum) are confirmed so far.

Many are assuming this means the main source material of the film will be "Avengers vs X-Men." Rather than start anew with a new X-Men cast and build up to such a battle, Marvel Studios might be using the event as one last hurrah for the previous X-Men actors.

In the comics, "Avengers vs X-Men" ran through 2012, authored by a team of writers (the aforementioned Mr. Hickman, Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, and Matt Fraction) and artists (Olivier Coipel, Adam Kubert, and John Romita Jr.). The titular conflict, trying to recapture the magic of earlier events like "House of M" and "Civil War," was over the Phoenix Force. Cyclops wanted to control the Phoenix for the greater good, while the Avengers wanted to destroy it.

The X-Men got their wish; Cyclops and his four disciples (Emma Frost, Colossus, Magik, and Namor) bonded with the Phoenix Force and briefly took over the world. Once the Avengers overthrew the Phoenix Five, the whole episode left mutants more hated than ever. (What else is new?)

Of course, "Avengers vs X-Men" is an open enough premise that you don't have to do the specific story the comic did. I'd even say "Doomsday" probably won't.

Now, this team of X-Men probably comes from the world seen at the end of "The Marvels." Based on Grammer's cameo as Beast in that movie, it's got the actors from the Fox movies but with Jim Lee-'90s "X-Men" costumes and aesthetics. Perhaps this world and the Avengers' will experience an Incursion, pitting the teams against each other for their own survival?

"Secret Wars" #1 did something similar, where Classic Marvel (Earth-616) and Ultimate Marvel (Earth-1610) were the only two realities left and then combined for the final Incursion. There's no onscreen analogue to the Ultimate Universe, but the X-Men's world could fill a similar role, so the Incursion is between two familiar worlds.

The "Doomsday" cast list also includes some important faces from the "Black Panther" films: Shuri (Letitia Wright), M'Baku (Winston Duke), and Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía). Is this hinting at a "Doomwar"? That refers to the 2010 mini-series (by writer Jonathan Maberry and artist Scot George Eaton) where Doctor Doom invaded Wakanda for its Vibranium supply. 

Doom rules his own country, the Eastern-European nation Latveria. This puts him on equal footing with the Black Panther, and the two have fought many times outside "Doomwar." When MCU fans assumed the movies would give the Doctor the slow-rolling intro he deserved, many had pegged a "Black Panther" film as a good place for Doom to show up.

Not for nothing, the X-Men were a big part of "Doomwar," fighting on Wakanda's side. (Of course, there it was because Storm was currently married to T'Challa, which is not the case in the MCU.) 

But could this risk being repetitive? "Infinity War" and "Wakanda Forever" also featured invasions of Wakanda, by Thanos' forces and Namor's sea-dwelling Talokanil. Then again, based on this cast list, "Avengers: Doomsday" does not seem to be a film about the virtue of experiencing new things.

 "Avengers: Doomsday" is scheduled to be released in theaters on May 1, 2026.