Thor swings Stormbreaker at Doctor Doom and it doesn’t matter. Doom brushes him off like a man waving away a fly, then delivers the line that’s going to live on T-shirts for the next two years: “Hell answers to me, for I am Doom…”
That’s the note Marvel chose to go out on at Disney’s D23 Ultimate Fan Event, where a new Avengers: Doomsday trailer premiered before hitting the internet. Robert Downey Jr.’s Victor von Doom carries the whole thing, and the footage is far more interested in why he’s doing this than in how many heroes it can cram into a frame.
Though it crams in plenty. The Avengers, the New Avengers, the Wakandans, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four all turn up, plus the returns of Thor, Loki and Steve Rogers.
Doom’s throne comes with a magic circle
The trailer opens on Downey’s Doom seated on a throne, most likely inside Castle Doomstadt in Latveria. Look at the floor.
Green mystical energy runs along lines etched into the ground, tracing what appears to be a large glyph. That’s the comic-accurate Doom, the one whose sorcery works in tandem with his science rather than replacing it. Marvel put it in the first 10 seconds so nobody could miss the point.
He knew the Fantastic Four before he was Doom
Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm tells the other heroes that Victor von Doom was “the smartest guy in every room,” and that he used to be a different man entirely. Later, Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards gets in Doom’s face and calls him by his first name.
Both moments point the same direction: shared history, probably rivalry, and the strong suggestion that Victor also comes from Earth-828. Which makes his abduction of Franklin Richards in the The Fantastic Four: First Steps post-credits scene land as something closer to a family betrayal.
The loss that broke him
Sue’s dialogue does double duty. The Victor the Fantastic Four knew was kind and caring, she said, and everything changed for him “when everything he loved was taken from him.”
Cut to Doom looking at a woven hanging that shows a woman and a child. You can do that math. Sue closes the thought with the trailer’s saddest line: “I knew he was lost, but I did not realize that he was broken.”
A villain who wants to conquer the multiverse is a plot. A villain who lost his family and decided the multiverse owes him something is a movie.
“Stolen lives”
Then comes the montage, and it’s stacked with people holding the things they’d die to keep. Scott Lang with Cassie. Thor with his adopted daughter Love. Johnny Storm with his nephew. Steve Rogers with his infant son. Sir Ian McKellan’s Magneto beside Sir Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier.
Over all of it, Doom argues that every one of them has been living “stolen lives” and that it’s time to give them back. Which feeds the long-running theory that the events of Avengers: Endgame did real damage to the multiverse, damage Doom may now be positioning himself to correct.
He’s not wrong is a hell of a thing to think about the guy in the metal mask.
A city that looks like it already lost
One shot cuts through everything else: a city flattened into apocalyptic wasteland. It bears a strong resemblance to the ruined world from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, home of that film’s more sinister Strange, a reality that collapsed under a major multiversal incursion.
If that read is right, Doom’s confrontation with Marvel's heroes could be staged on the corpse of a world that already went through this once.
New looks at faces the first trailer skipped
Compared with the first Avengers: Doomsday trailer, the D23 footage hands out fresh shots of Magneto, Gambit, Shang-Chi, Cyclops, Ant-Man, Human Torch and more of the confirmed cast. It’s a lot of people to service in one film, and the trailer’s answer is to give each of them a second rather than a scene.
The Sentinels get back up
After dismissing Thor, Doom turns his magic on a field of fallen Sentinels, the mutant-killing robots, and raises them like an army of the dead.
Which tells you where this fight probably happens. Piles of dead Sentinels don’t collect just anywhere. They collect at the ruins of the Xavier Mansion, and Doom is standing in them, making the machines that hunted mutants answer to him instead.
