Final summer season, Marvel Studios dropped one hell of a shock at its San Diego Comedian-Con panel when it was introduced that Robert Downey Jr. will play Physician Doom in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. And but mockingly, regardless of Doom being the Unbelievable 4’s arch-enemy within the comics, he received’t be antagonizing them in July’s The Unbelievable 4: First Steps. As a substitute, Galactus was chosen to be the upcoming Marvel film’s foremost villain, and I like director Matt Shakman’s clarification for why this occurred.
In an in depth profile about First Steps put collectively by EW, Shakman, who beforehand helmed the whole lot of WandaVision (which you’ll be able to stream utilizing your Disney+ subscription), talked about that Marvel Studios’ plans to fit Doom in as the brand new antagonist for The Multiverse Saga following Jonathan Majors’ dismissal as Kang the Conqueror allowed he and his crew to strive one thing totally different. Because the filmmaker shared:
Doom’s a terrific character, however he takes up loads of air. Different movie diversifications have executed each an origin story and Doom. We’re doing neither, and that enables us to take a look at them from a recent perspective.
Now to be truthful, Ralph Ineson’s casting as Galactus was reported in Might 2024, two months earlier than Robert Downey Jr. walked onto the Corridor H stage and dramatically took off his Physician Doom masks. So we knew that this entity that eats planets would play a giant function in The Unbelievable 4: First Steps, however that didn’t essentially forestall Doom from showing too. In spite of everything, 2007’s Unbelievable 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer featured each characters, although Galactus was depicted as a sentient cloud fairly than in his conventional humanoid kind.
Nevertheless, it was finally determined to go away Physician Doom out of First Steps, and I get the rationale that Matt Shakman supplied. Victor von Doom has appeared within the earlier three Unbelievable 4 motion pictures (4 in case you depend 1994’s unreleased flick), with the 2005 and 2015 ones telling his origin story. That’s to not say we received’t get that within the MCU, however leaving Doom out of First Steps actually helps with making this Unbelievable 4 film stand out from its predecessors.
However as one can surmise from a personality who’s known as the Devourer of Worlds, Galactus received’t have any situation wreaking havoc in The Unbelievable 4: First Steps, and he’ll be aided by his herald, Julia Garner’s Silver Surfer. This 2025 film launch takes place on a Nineteen Sixties-inspired retrofuturistic Earth within the MCU’s multiverse, with Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards being answerable for scientific developments like area journey and creating robots. However Galactus’ arrival will pressure even his sizable mind, with Pascal saying:
It’s positively a scale of risk which Reed has by no means skilled. Even the neatest man on the planet is awestruck by a being that outdates his understanding of time.
We have now a couple of months to go to see how Mister Unbelievable, Invisible Girl, The Factor and The Human Torch’s conflict with Galactus and Silver Surfer seems. The excellent news, although, is we are going to see the MCU’s Unbelievable 4 and Physician Doom share a film comparatively quickly. It was confirmed earlier this month that Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn will reprise the quartet in Avengers: Doomsday subsequent yr, and I’ve to assume they’ll get an honest quantity of display time with Robert Downey Jr.’s new character.
Different actors showing in The Unbelievable 4: First Steps embrace Paul Walter Hauser, John Malkovich, Natasha Lyonne and Sarah Niles. The film opens in theaters on July 25, after which we’ll get to see Physician Doom come to the forefront when Avengers: Doomsday follows on Might 1, 2026.