Marvel announces 'Avengers: Secret Wars' and 'Avengers: Doomsday' directed by the Russo Brothers

I am seriously just in awe at how dumb it is

Best guess doom is now multiverse stark instead of his own character. Not expecting much.

I really don't know how they expect to pull it off. With some of the other actors that have played multiple roles in Marvel movies (both Human Torches, for example), they weren't MCU movies and they weren't popular with audiences. RDJ was Iron Man, the springboard for the MCU, and present in the movies for over a decade.

Secretly I'm hoping that this is just a publicity stunt and he plays a bit role that has less than 10 minutes of screen time.

It's especially odd to me because if they'd made it a twist that Doctor Doom was a version of Stark from another universe, that could have been a nice surprise. Yet, they must be hoping that RDJ himself will put butts back in seats, I assume? But it's Tony Stark's personality and charm that make him appealing to audiences, not just the face of RDJ. And he'd be behind a mask, hopefully! There's just so many confusing factors...

I read the news on three different websites to make sure I was reading it right. This is so dumb lol

My problem with the multiverse is you have to watch the Disney shows to get the references in the blockbuster movies. When Wanda appears in Multiverse of Maddness, you were confused unless you watched WandaVision.

The fact that they feel obligated to tying together every property they've produced in the last number of years is getting exhausting. I agree that I would much rather have stand alone movies or series, they shouldn't need to be intertwined so deeply that you miss something because you failed to catch up on 3 other properties. I feel it's pulling down everything produced after End Game.

Let Tony Stark stay dead. If RDJ wants more of that sweet Marvel money, more power to him, but he's going to have to use all his actimg chops to differentiate himself.

I feel like the responses here to the RDJ casting are a bit overblown? Like, he has range, have you seen Oppenheimer, or Tropic Thunder? I wouldn't be surprised to learn, that part of the reason RDJ wanted out was that he felt stifled by the Iron Man role.

I am also on board! Love RDJ, and for me it doesn’t hurt to get some familiar faces back into the MCU. I think they handled Wolverine pretty well in D&W, seeing as the ending in Logan was pretty final I think they can make this work as well.

The obvious assumption here is Marvel/Disney have decided to learn the wrong lesson from what's been going on in the MCU since Endgame.

It's not a popular reality on social media, but A-listers are A-list because they put butts in seats. It's not a reward, it's a recognition that they have draw. That's why they're A-list, why they're paid tens of millions of dollars. After all, there are literally thousands upon thousands of actors just in Los Angeles, much less New York and Atlanta and Toronto and London and so on. Why pay all that money for an A-list actor when you could pay a fraction of that to pick some nobody up instead?

Draw. Charisma. That magic spell they can cast that puts butts in seats at the theater, that encourages consumers to engage with the product (movie).

The MCU used to have A-listers involved in their projects prior to Endgame. RDJ was an outcast A-lister, but as we now know he had managed to successfully put his life back together and remove the problem areas (drugs) that had made him unbankable. But even with those uncertainties, he was a former A-lister and had a track record of headliner movie magic (again, putting butts in seats) so Favreau got Marvel and Paramount to take a chance (that paid off).

The MCU movies tended to have A-listers carrying the cast. Especially where they had lesser knowns (Hemsworth, Evans as two examples) in the lead role. Hemsworth had Hopkins, while Evans had Jones and Weaving, for example. Even Guardians, which didn't really have any true A-listers, still packed the cast with some very promising actors who were well known to audiences (Saldana, Pratt, Rooker, Pace, Close, Reilly, among others).

Then in Phase 4 (and 5), that A-list presence seemed to be forgotten. It dropped out of the films. I want to be clear to people who are going to get irritable about this; I'm not, at all, saying there were bad actors cast. Most, pretty much all as far as I'm concerned, were solid actors. Some were, are, great actors. But fewer of the casts in Phase 4/5 had that A-list magic to lean on. To anchor their films.

And it shows. I liked Eternals, for example. More than a lot of people did it seems. But it wasn't lost on me that the best they really had to offer were some Game of Thrones actors done with GoT, and two faded A-listers from yesteryear (Hayek and Jolie). It's arguable Jolie still is A-list, after all Disney is anchoring Maleficent with her, but Jolie's not in her heyday anymore and her presence with the audiences of now (or 2019) isn't what it was in, say, the late 90s and early 00s.

So, swinging back to Doom and RDJ, this really feels like the studio realizing they'd tried to move away from casting A-listers into their films. That they thought the franchise, the world, was enough to carry the films. If so, the results seem to bear out that it hasn't played that way with audiences, or in ticket sales. So, in typical Hollywood fashion, they dropped back and punted.

And punting in Hollywood usually means throwing cash at a known solution, a big obvious name. Here, RDJ. It's not a tough sell in the meetings (the financial meetings, not creative). They have the entire Infinity Gauntlet saga headlined by RDJ to point to.

Sure RDJ was costing them tens of millions per appearance (I remember hearing something like 50+ million was his paycheck for Endgame; whatever, a lot of money, clearly), but the movies were making so much that in the aftermath the studio doesn't care that RDJ walked away with as much as he did. So if the underperformance of the Phase 4/5 films gets to the point where "What do we do" meetings are being held, RDJ is an obvious solution if you try to imagine how a non-creative Hollywood (read: Wall Street MBA) type would think.

It's not that I think RDJ can't play Doom. He totally can. RDJ is a talented actor who's also A-list. He can anchor any project he decides to sign on with, and will play the hell out of whatever role he takes. If they're going to write Doom for RDJ, then I know it'll be great because RDJ is a great actor.

But it is going to confuse some in the audience. It confused me. There's apparently a Doom story from the Marvel catalog where Doom meets Stark at college, and decides to mind-switch them because Stark is rich (and Doom isn't but wanted the resources). I listened to a rundown of that story and it's alright, but I don't think it'll knock the socks off general audiences, not the way the Infinity Gauntlet saga did.

Based on the MCU's track record, I doubt they'll take that one story and use it as the basis for whatever they'll have RDJ doing. I expect what we'll probably get is some sort of multiverse switch, from a universe where Doom became Stark or some comic book shenanigans that add up to largely the same thing. A portal opens, or a spell is cast, or an exotic energy reactor explodes or whatever, and then poof a Doom that looks like Stark is here and proceeds to be involved in the movie(s).

Whatever it is, I figure it should be fun. The issue is whether general audiences sign up for it. Which brings us back to the A-list issue. RDJ is definitely A-list right now, and as far as the MCU is concerned he's the top of their A-list. They brought him back for silly non-creative reasons, but now that the money trucks have been dumped on his driveway, what I care about is the story. I do have some faith they'll write a great Doom story, and am prepared to give them every benefit of the doubt until I'm sitting watching end credits start with a disgusted look on my kisser.