Avengers: Doomsday’s Doctor Doom feels just like a classic manga character

The clock ticks ever-closer to the debut of Physician Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, however the movie surprisingly stays a thriller. Marvel nonetheless hasn’t publicly launched the newest CinemaCon trailer, although a number of leaks trace at an fascinating parallel between Physician Doom and Griffith from Berserk.

Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, serialized since 1989, stays certainly one of manga’s most iconic works. Though the story is advised by way of protagonist Guts’ eyes, the opening arc follows his exploits with the Band of the Hawk, whose silver-haired, dreamy chief usually steals the limelight.

Griffith is a type of uncommon larger-than-life characters with a fancy arc: a visionary whose dream curdles into one thing a lot darker by the tip of the Golden Age. On the floor, he and Doom couldn’t be extra completely different, however each are magnetic leaders pushed by a near-religious obsession with transcendence.

Victor von Doom usually pursues that by way of mind and sorcery, continually pushing previous human limits. His quest for transcendence is placed on full show after attaining omnipotence as God Emperor Doom within the 2015 Secret Wars storyline — a storyline set to be tailored within the sequel to Doomsday that bears the identical identify. Griffith’s path is much extra horrifying however thematically aligned, culminating within the Eclipse, the place he sacrifices all the pieces to ascend as a member of the God Hand.

They’re on two completely different paths, however they comply with the identical philosophy: The ends justify the means.

That overlap could also be key to understanding Doomsday and, extra particularly, Physician Doom’s position in it. With Anthony and Joe Russo on the helm as soon as extra — and Robert Downey Jr. getting into Doom’s armor as a substitute of Iron Man’s — the movie is clearly aiming for a extra layered antagonist, similar to Thanos in Infinity Conflict. On the coronary heart of it’s that casting twist, which appears to recommend Doom might use his look as a method to achieve the Avengers’ belief.

Leaked descriptions of the current CinemaCon trailer level to a fractured battlefield, with the Avengers on one aspect, the X-Males on the opposite, and Doom on the middle of all of it. The core concept nonetheless holds. Like Griffith, Doom might nicely unify these heroes underneath a shared trigger, solely to sacrifice them in pursuit of one thing better. If that’s the play, Doomsday isn’t constructing to an all-out brawl between our favourite Marvel icons. It’s establishing a betrayal that can have devastating penalties on the whole MCU.

Marvel isn’t refined with its Berserk influences. The sequence’ most notorious imagery, the aforementioned Eclipse, is already echoed within the MCU’s Incursions, these cataclysmic reality-collapsing occasions that really feel eerily comparable in each scale and symbolism.

We’ve seen glimpses of that on-screen, most notably in Physician Unusual within the Multiverse of Insanity, the place a bleeding, eclipse-like sky looms behind Sinister Unusual’s Sanctum Sanctorum. Doomsday might take these parts a step additional, positioning Physician Doom as a Griffith-like determine orchestrating his personal model of the Eclipse, reshaping actuality into Battleworld and setting the stage for 2015’s Avengers: Secret Wars.

It’s nonetheless too early to inform if Marvel can stick the touchdown with Doomsday. But when they get it proper, Downey’s Victor von Doom gained’t simply be a villain. He’ll be a believer, one prepared to sacrifice all the pieces to show he’s proper.