Robert Downey Jr. Returns to the MCU as a Villain: Masterstroke or Misstep?

No matter how you slice it, this looks like a move of desperation

Paramount Pictures

Last weekend it was announced that Robert Downey Jr. (RDJ) would be returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe he helped create. RDJ famously and brilliantly played Tony Stark / Iron Man for 11 years and 10 films before permanently hanging up the helmet. Fan favorites Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson also retired their tights around the same time. Along with Chadwick Boseman's tragic passing, the departures left a sizable chasm in the roster Marvel has been unable to fill even after 5 years.

The unprecedented run from Iron Man to Endgame was historically great. Apart from a few fumbles, those films are all bangers. So you could suggest Marvel was due for a bad turn, one hastened by the end of the Infinity Saga, a conclusion so final it necessitated a soft reset of the franchise. The novelty is also largely gone. You've seen one megalomaniac intent on destroying the world and ruling over the ashes, you've seen them all.

But it's also easy to believe a degree of hubris contributed to the MCU's downturn. If you've had the Midas touch for over a decade, you start to believe you can do no wrong. Marvel somehow made Ant-Man exciting, a character whose power is probably definitely a metaphor for erections. But their finest trick is also their luckiest.

The initial MCU was built around characters so undesirable that a cash-poor Marvel had been unable to sell their film rights during a fire sale in the 90s. Sony famously had a chance to buy the rights to almost every Marvel character for $25 million. They instead purchased the rights to Spider-Man for $7 million, and offered this helpful rejoinder: "Nobody gives a damn about the other Marvel characters."

I wonder if that Sony exec still has a job?

The thing is—Sony wasn't entirely wrong. Spider-Man was the clear top dog. Everything else was second fiddle or worse. Marvel was eventually able to license the X-Men, Fantastic 4, Blade, Punisher, Daredevil, Ghost Rider, and Hulk. So when they decided to take a play from Thanos' playbook and do movies themselves, they only had the unwanted leftovers to work with. Characters who'd been passed over by every studio in Hollywood. Characters the market had deemed worthless.

It seems really weird to type those words sitting here in 2024, knowing what we know now. But this was lived experience. I remember scoffing at the announcement that Marvel was making movies about Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. It seemed like a terrible idea. Thor was a space god and Captain America was so old he'd literally punched out Hitler. How do you make them relatable, interesting, or exciting?

I at least knew something about Cap and Thor. Iron Man had never really pinged my radar, even though I was a comic-reading kid in the 80s. I had issues of Iron Man but never really cared about him. He was a guy in a suit. Yawn. My personal pecking order of Marvel characters in the 80s and 90s was: Spider-Man, the X-Men (including Magneto), the Incredible Hulk, Doctor Doom, Daredevil... and that's about it.

Marvel building a billion-dollar franchise on the shoulders of third-rate characters is probably the clearest sign of their storytelling acumen. They made us care, and in the process flipped the script on which characters were considered valuable. They've earned all their unfathomable success. But luck clearly played an outsized role. There would be no MCU if not for Sony's shortsighted if hilarious "it's a no from me, dawg."

At some point Marvel started to believe their own hype. Which is how you turn a dark storyline about a serial killer of gods into a prolonged orgy joke. Or assassinate the character of Wanda Maximoff so you can have a horror film. Or create Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, a bland and cliched bowl of meh.

I'm enough of a nerd that I remain aware of all MCU developments even if I've emotionally checked out of the relationship. I'm interested in seeing Deadpool and Wolverine, but I wouldn't say I'm overly excited about it. My heart just isn't in it.

This is probably what burnout looks like. My enthusiasm for the MCU has been drained by too many movies that didn't aim for anything other than spectacle, and too many Disney+ shows that served no purpose other than to keep my subscription active.

I don't think I'm alone in this. In fact, I know I'm not. We can quibble over whether or not the MCU's cultural significance is on the wane—I say yes, definitely—but there's no arguing which way Marvel Studio's finances are trending.

Graph by author

Which is why Marvel is paying RDJ untold millions to come back—please please please—and save the MCU.

I'd be lying if I didn't say the news hit me where I live.

The pivot was necessitated after Kang the Conquerer was revealed to be a second-rate Thanos and Kang actor Jonathan Majors was outed as an abusive asshole. Marvel was saddled with an uninspiring villain they suddenly needed to recast. Instead they wisely went in a different direction, which further invalidates Quantumania—music to my ears—but also threatens to topple all the careful story scaffolding Marvel has erected to make us properly fear Kang. A problem but not a deal-breaker in a cinematic universe that has embraced time travel and the multiverse.

First we got word that the Russo brothers—who presided over the greatest superhero movie run ever (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame)—are returning to direct the next two Avengers films, since revealed to be Avengers: Doomsday (2026) and Avengers: Secret Wars (2027).

The bombshells kept falling.

Screenwriter Stephen McFeely—who co-wrote all of the Russo brothers MCU films, along with Christopher Markus—is writing Doomsday and Secret Wars.

Robert Downey Jr. is returning to the MCU. Impossible, you say. Tony Stark died, you claim. Well, that alone wouldn't stop Marvel from making it happen if both parties were down to party. There have been rumors for years about Tony coming back via hologram / replicant / sex doll. (Okay, I made up the last one.) Well, the thing is... he's not playing Tony Stark this time.

Original images UPN, meme by author

Marvel is emptying the vault to make this reunion possible. Variety is reporting the Russos are being paid $80 million to direct the two films. RDJ is being paid "significantly more" to play Doctor Doom, who is basically the Darth Vader of the Marvel universe.

I'd like to editorialize for a moment.

Doctor Doom is my favorite comic book villain of all time. He has an iconic look—an Iron Man type of suit with the aesthetic of a medieval knight who attends Eyes Wide Shut soirees. He's crazy powerful, wielding a mix of science and magic, so much so that it takes the entire Fantastic 4 to fight him. He's the king of an Eastern European country. He's a genius, a narcissist, a madman. He wears a cape!

I've been waiting for this casting ever since Marvel announced they were working on the Fantastic 4. Doctor Doom is THE villain of the MCU. You'd be forgiven for thinking Thanos had that crown, but Thanos was a one-trick purple pony. Doctor Doom—despite his name—isn't so unrelentingly evil. Usually his ends run counter to the common good, and therefore the heroes rally to stop him. But sometimes he fights alongside the good guys. In Facebook parlance, his relationship with the Fantastic 4 is complicated. It makes for interesting conflicts.

I believe RDJ can nail Doom's personality. Tony Stark is already 3/4s of the way there; he just needs to tone-down the quips and amp-up the malevolence. But the question I've been pondering is should he? Is RDJ really the best Marvel could do, or is this a move of desperation spurred by increasing indifference to the MCU?

Let's first address the genius / billionaire / playboy / philanthropist in the corner: RDJ has been the face of the MCU for so long, it will be really weird seeing him as a bad guy. There's no way to see him in a Marvel movie and not think, "that's Tony Stark." This is nothing like when Chris Evans played Johnny Storm / The Human Torch and then was cast as Captain America. It's more like if Harrison Ford returned to Star Wars as Darth Vader. Except Ford was never the face of Star Wars, and he only played Han Solo in 4 movies. It's just kinda crazy, right? Interesting PR move though.

The goodish news—Doctor Doom spends all his time wearing a metal mask. Casting RDJ as a villain who never removes his helmet is one way to sidestep the "hey, that's definitely Tony Stark" problem. It does make you wonder why you'd even bother casting RDJ in the first place though, doesn't it? Other than the obvious excitement of bringing RDJ back.

I have to believe multiversal shenanigans will be involved to explain why Doctor Doom looks like Tony Stark. It makes sense, actually. There are a lot of similarities between the two characters—both are egotistical geniuses with deep pockets and the coolest tech around. This could be a cautionary tale, a sort of "what if" that results in Tony Stark becoming the world's greatest villain. And Marvel has shown they love the multiverse. I'm less of a fan, but tomato / potato.

Except Marvel haven't left themselves very much runway to get this bird off the ground. Doom needs to arrive, more or less fully formed, because we're only getting him for 2 movies. The comparisons to Thanos are inescapable so we might as well lean into them: Thanos appeared briefly in 3 films—and his presence shadowed most of the MCU starting with The Avengers—before his official debut in Infinity War. We'll be lucky to get one Doctor Doom post-credit scene before Avengers: Doomsday.

This is actually my biggest problem with the casting. It seems to put a really short fuse on Doctor Doom. RDJ will be safely in his 60s by the time these two Avengers films release. I don't care how much CGI Marvel relies on—a borderline geriatric villain ain't scaring nobody. But let's say Marvel sufficiently de-ages RDJ. How long is he going to play this character? Hint: His deal was for 2 movies.

Are we truly only getting 2 movies with Doctor Doom, Marvel's best villain bar none? That seems impossibly stupid. Will Marvel recast Doom? If that's the plan, why bring back RDJ in the first place?

Recall that these are all fairly recent developments. Quantumania—Kang's big screen christening—released in February 2023. Though Marvel officially moved on from Majors after he was convicted of assault in December, they likely started working on contingencies in March 2023, after Majors was arrested and also when they released Kang was a boring villain actually. That seems like plenty of time to bang something into place, but also not enough time to counter the years-long gestation Marvel projects typically undergo. The MCU is built around phases for a reason. They like to seed things and give them time to sprout. Doctor Doom is getting none of that.

It's actually Marvel's stubborn reliance on phases that's part of the problem. Each phase is meant to build toward a no-holds-barred super-powered brawl against the biggest of bads. Once Kang tapped out of the next two-part Avengers throwdown, someone else needed to tap in. So Marvel frantically started playing Doom's music and sent him running out of the tunnel half-dressed, instead of doing the sensible thing and pushing back the conclusion of Phase 6 a year or two. Doesn't Doctor Doom deserve at least a modicum of setup? But as always, capitalism is both the ends and means of these things. The show must go on because the shareholders demand it.

And if this gambit is successful at galvanizing audiences to return to theaters in droves? What does it say about the MCU that it can only be successful by giving us the same old faces? What does it say about us?

There are no answers here, only lots and lots of questions.

One thing about all this—it's got us talking about the MCU again, and not just in a "man, the MCU kinda sucks these days" way. Despite everything I just said, I'm cautiously optimistic. I adore the Russo brother's MCU films, and RDJ is an incredible actor. Plus, we're getting Doctor Freaking Doom. Gotta love it.

I'm just afraid that in the rush to get clear of the Kang fiasco, Marvel is going to make a bigger mess of things. You only get one shot at something like this, and Marvel is charging into it with none of the forethought and setup that characterized their other films. If you can look past the splashy headlines, the vibes are just not good.