The Return of Robert Downey Jr. Was Marvel’s Secret Weapon for Comic-Con

The Marvel panel at Hall H ended with quite a surprise. As Joe and Anthony Russo came out on stage to talk about Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, they revealed who their Victor Von Doom is and you’ll never guess! It’s … Robert Downey Jr.?

Doom was standing in his iconic look on stage and he took off his mask to reveal none other than Tony Stark himself. “New mask. Same task,” Downey said, but it does bring up a lot of questions. Like what? Why? How? A lot of people seemed to instantly think that he would be a multiversal variant, but on the whole, it just left us all with a lot of unanswered questions that we need to figure out.

Personally, at first, I thought it was a bit. I was in the room and still didn’t think Downey was actually returning to the MCU. I thought they were teasing that they are doing Doomsday but don’t have a Doom yet. If it is really going to be Downey (I still can’t wrap my mind around this!), I do think it’ll be interesting to watch the Avengers fighting someone who looks like their friend—but I was secretly hoping Downey was coming back for Ironheart and Riri Williams instead.

Everything happened so fast that we’re now all sitting here wondering what any of this means. Victor Von Doom and Tony Stark are two decidedly different people so how Downey can be both is going to be interesting to watch unfold. Is he just going to be Tony Stark but he goes by Doom in another universe? Right now, this kind of feels like a premise from What If …?, and I hope this isn’t the only version of Victor that we are getting because it’s … weird. Something else is going on, I can feel it.

Until we know more (or more specifically how this is going to work since Robert Downey Jr. played Tony Stark for years and his character is one of the very few MCU characters to have been given a definitive death), we can at least get excited about the idea of Avengers: Doomsday.