Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom Casting... Is He a Tony Stark Variant or a Completely Different Character?

When Kevin Feigeannounced that Robert Downey Jr.has been cast as Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, he introduced him as Victor Von Doom.

This announcement made huge waves in the fan community and it left a lot of people confused because is Downey Jr. playing a variant of Tony Stark who is Doctor Doom in an alternate universe? Or, is the actor playing a completely separate character altogether?

This article was sparked by a recent comment made by Feige, saying that he thought Logan's ending was amazing and that Marvel wanted to do something similar when it came time for Robert Downey Jr. to say goodbye to Iron Man.

Feige said: “I had always been very vocal with Hugh that he had one of the best endings of any fictional character ever. And I told him that is so amazing, what he was able to accomplish in Logan, that's what we were striving for with Robert Downey Jr. in Endgame, to give this incredible iconic fictional character an amazing ending.”

So why would they bring Downey Jr. back as a possible evil version of Tony Stark with Doctor Doom? Well, they’re not.

I always thought he would be a completely different character, and it was recently explained to me that Downey Jr. is in fact playing a completely separate character, to the point where other Marvel characters who knew Tony Stark won’t recognize him as Tony Stark.

While I always thought that would be an interesting dynamic to see a character like Spider-Man face off with an evil version of someone he cared for, that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Downey Jr. will be Doctor Doom, which is so weird to me! It seems ridiculous to cast Downey Jr. to play a completely new character that is in no way connected to Tony Stark.

But, this also won’t be hard to pull off as Doom’s face is under the mask is pretty jacked up. They will be able to make him unrecognizable.

As far as Doom’s story arc goes, it was previously rumored that "Doom isn’t truly evil; he believes he’s saving the Multiverse from incursions. According to his twisted logic, the only way for the Multiverse to survive is to unify all universes in one place (Battleworld) under his rule. He sees this as the sole path to ensuring survival for everyone."

We don’t know for sure if this is the direction that the Russo Bros. are looking to take the story, but it’s a storyline that I could see being played with. It will be interesting to see how Doom’s story arc is going to play out over the course of Doomsday and Secret Wars.

What do you think about all this?