How Marvel deals with Doctor Doom is make or break for the MCU. No one wants a watered-down Tony Stark

The hooded supervillain is a scientist, a sorcerer, a monarch and a mummy’s boy – Robert Downey Jr’s Doom should be all these things and more, radiating history, magic and the biggest ego

The problem with building the next stage of your superhero franchise around Doctor Doom is that nobody really knows if he is Marvel’s Darth Vader, or just the guy from those terrible 20th Century Fox films. We wouldn’t even be getting Doom in the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday if Marvel’s original post-Thanos masterplan had not collapsed when Jonathan Majors, who played Kang, was dropped from the franchise. And we don’t really know if the subsequent casting of Robert Downey Jr (previously Marvel’s Iron Man) in the role is some kind of ingenious masterstroke that will all make sense when we finally see the finished film, or just an expensive nostalgia panic button.

The stakes are so high here that the geekosphere is delving into every possible clue, no matter how fleeting, as to which version of Doom we might be getting in the film. Will this be a flamboyant, comics-accurate take on the Latverian dictator? Or will Marvel dip into the multiverse of convenience and deliver an iteration that is little more than Tony Stark in eastern Europe?