New 'Fantastic Four' May Dramatically Rework Origin Of Doctor Doom

Fantastic Four fans, hold on to yourselves. We've known the new film, directed by Josh Trank (Chronicle) will have some radically different concepts going on than we're used to seeing in the classic Fantastic Four comics. But now Toby Kebbell, who plays the film's version of Doctor Doom, has revealed a few things about his character. And they're far more different than you'd probably been guessing so far.

In a conversation with Collider, Kebbell said,

I'm excited to see it too, and my nerves really...The only thing I can tease you about is what I worked on most was the voice because nobody—even in the cartoons, when I was watching them I was like, "So where's he from?"  There's a mild change and I'll tell you because of our history. He's Victor Domashev, not Victor Von Doom in our story.  And I'm sure I'll be sent to jail for telling you that.  The Doom in ours—I'm a programmer.  Very anti-social programmer.  And on blogging sites I'm "Doom".

So it's a Doom more like the Ultimates version of the character, which isn't super-surprising, given that we've known that the Ultimates storyline was a big influence on on the direction of this film.

Based on Kebbell's comments, I'm picturing an evil version of Dexter Douglas from Freakazoid!, but in reality this is probably going to be something a bit more legitimately evil. There could be some real-world influence – maybe think of some mid-point between the jerks who hack and leak nude photos and the extreme sociopathic tendencies of a guy like Elliot Rodger — but in a manner stylized enough to fit with the FF. How that ends up working with the story of Reed Richards is something we don't know, but we'll still probably see Richards and this version of Doom as idealogical opposites.

Could Kebbell be exaggerating here, or planting misinformation? Possible, but he could have just not answered at all. We'll take him at his word.

Kebbell also said,

Yeah, it was cool man.  Josh, the whole deal, the lo-fi way he did it, the ultra-real.  It was just nice to do that.  It was nice to be feeling like we had to come to terms with what was given by this incident.

Fantastic Four opens August 7, 2015.