Doom Is the Only Villain Who Fits
Doomsday exists because Kang didn’t work. Quantumania was meant to launch years of Kang stories, and that plan got dropped, so The Kang Dynasty became Doomsday with Doom in the middle of it. I’ve had my doubts about Kang since 2023, because a villain made of infinite variants dilutes himself, where Thanos got built up slowly over several films. I also said being right for the wrong reasons is mostly luck, my objection was about drama and the outcome was about circumstance. Was Doom an upgrade or a panic move? A panic move that happened to land on the right answer, and I’d rather they got lucky than stayed the course out of stubbornness. That makes Quantumania one of the most skippable films in the rewatch, not because it’s bad but because the franchise itself decided it didn’t matter, so watch the Council of Kangs scene and see what got left behind.
The trailers lean right into him. He’s mostly a green hood and a metal mask. The shot everybody’s going to remember comes about a minute and a half into the July trailer, when Thor comes down on him in a storm of lightning with Mjolnir, and one gloved hand just stops it. No effort. Thor’s eyes are white, the man in the hood hasn’t moved, and it’s over in seconds. Robert Downey Jr. under that mask had me unsure in 2024, I wondered if it was an admission they couldn’t move past him, and that reading hasn’t held up at all. Doom isn’t Tony Stark with a mask on, and nothing in the footage suggests it. There’s only one of him, and after Kang that’s the whole appeal.
The Rules Got Set in Multiverse of Madness
Incursions are the one thing you can’t skip. Two universes touch and both die, and Multiverse of Madness says so almost in passing, four years before the film that pays it off. It also establishes that the people who police this can be wiped out in an afternoon, and that crossing over depends on a person rather than a machine. Almost every rule December’s going to run on got set there, in a film I ranked below its predecessor, because it’s the more consequential one and the less enjoyable one. I’ve still got the same complaint about Wanda, too. Marvel keeps stopping its most powerful characters by having them choose to stop. I’d have let her take what she wanted, had Strange fail outright, and made the next film about him using the Darkhold to undo it.
WandaVision is the other half of that, and it’s where the rewatch surprised me most. The cabin scene at the end played as redemption in 2021, and the whole series is built to earn that. Knowing what follows, it’s much closer to a relapse waiting to happen, and the scene hasn’t changed at all, just everything around it. A show that careful about grief deserved a film equally careful and it got a horror movie instead. Nothing’s dented the Ship of Theseus scene, meanwhile, and Vision’s quiet exit is a remarkable way to leave somebody introduced as the culmination of two films’ worth of setup. Monica’s the thread that keeps going, since it runs from Westview to The Marvels and on to the X-Men, and I found her flat on first watch, which is a fair reminder that least interesting and least consequential aren’t the same thing. Watch that last cabin shot knowing exactly what it means.
Reed Is Scared and Franklin Is Waiting
First Steps is the film the whole run’s been walking toward, not because it’s the best of them but because it’s holding the pieces that matter. I barely mentioned the separate-universe thing in my 2025 review, it seemed like a convenience, and it’s nothing of the kind, because you need a separate universe before you can have an incursion story. And the Reed in this one’s the correct Reed. He’s anxious, over-prepared and visibly carrying the weight of everybody expecting him to solve everything, and that’s what makes the rivalry work. Doom against a serenely brilliant Reed is just two clever men arguing at each other. Doom against a Reed who’s quietly terrified of failing the people who depend on him is a real fight, because Doom’s whole proposition is that he’d do the job better.
Franklin’s the one I gave almost no attention first time round, which was a mistake. Anybody with a passing knowledge of the comics knows what that child could be, the film puts him on the board and then leaves him alone, and whether December uses him is the single most interesting open question going in. Nothing’s changed my mind about Galactus, who shows up as a problem to be solved rather than a fact to be survived, though the Silver Surfer’s still the best version we’ve had. The trailers have the Fantastic Four out of their own world already. In the July trailer and the January Wakanda teaser, Ben Grimm’s on a beach shaking hands with M’Baku, Shuri and the Dora Milaje with a wall of water standing behind them, and it’s about the strangest image Marvel’s given us. That retro-futurism was the visible evidence that it’s somewhere else, and the more distinct it looks, the more the collision’s going to cost.
