Last summer, Marvel Studios dropped one hell of a surprise at its San Diego Comic-Con panel when it was announced that Robert Downey Jr. will play Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. And yet ironically, despite Doom being the Fantastic Four’s arch-enemy in the comics, he won’t be antagonizing them in July’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Instead, Galactus was chosen to be the upcoming Marvel movie’s main villain, and I like director Matt Shakman’s explanation for why this happened.
In an extensive profile about First Steps put together by EW, Shakman, who previously helmed the entirety of WandaVision (which you can stream using your Disney+ subscription), mentioned that Marvel Studios’ plans to slot Doom in as the new antagonist for The Multiverse Saga following Jonathan Majors’ dismissal as Kang the Conqueror allowed he and his team to try something different. As the filmmaker shared:
Doom's a great character, but he takes up a lot of air. Other film adaptations have done both an origin story and Doom. We're doing neither, and that allows us to look at them from a fresh perspective.
Now to be fair, Ralph Ineson’s casting as Galactus was reported in May 2024, two months before Robert Downey Jr. walked onto the Hall H stage and dramatically took off his Doctor Doom mask. So we knew that this entity that eats planets would play a big role in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but that didn’t necessarily prevent Doom from appearing too. After all, 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer featured both characters, though Galactus was depicted as a sentient cloud rather than in his traditional humanoid form.
However, it was ultimately decided to leave Doctor Doom out of First Steps, and I get the rationale that Matt Shakman provided. Victor von Doom has appeared in the previous three Fantastic Four movies (four if you count 1994’s unreleased flick), with the 2005 and 2015 ones telling his origin story. That’s not to say we won’t get that in the MCU, but leaving Doom out of First Steps certainly helps with making this Fantastic Four movie stand out from its predecessors.
But as one can surmise from a character who’s referred to as the Devourer of Worlds, Galactus won’t have any issue wreaking havoc in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and he’ll be aided by his herald, Julia Garner’s Silver Surfer. This 2025 movie release takes place on a 1960s-inspired retrofuturistic Earth in the MCU’s multiverse, with Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards being responsible for scientific advancements like space travel and creating robots. But Galactus’ arrival will strain even his sizable intellect, with Pascal saying:
It is definitely a scale of threat which Reed has never experienced. Even the smartest man in the world is awestruck by a being that outdates his understanding of time.
We have a few months to go to see how Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, The Thing and The Human Torch’s clash with Galactus and Silver Surfer turns out. The good news, though, is we will see the MCU’s Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom share a movie relatively soon. It was confirmed earlier this month that Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn will reprise the quartet in Avengers: Doomsday next year, and I have to think they’ll get a decent amount of screen time with Robert Downey Jr.’s new character.
Other actors appearing in The Fantastic Four: First Steps include Paul Walter Hauser, John Malkovich, Natasha Lyonne and Sarah Niles. The movie opens in theaters on July 25, and then we’ll get to see Doctor Doom come to the forefront when Avengers: Doomsday follows on May 1, 2026.
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