The problem with Doctor Doom in films

There have been four live-action Fantastic Four movies, three starters and a sequel, and they’ve all used Doctor Doom as the villain - even that sequel Rise Of The Silver Surfer had him cause more trouble than the world-eating space god Galactus. This is natural, Doom is the biggest villain in the series and one of the biggest in the Marvel Universe... and they’ve all played him off-model.

The 1994 zero-budget rights-keeper by Roger Corman actually played him pretty close, considering.

The 2005 version looked the part in the end after spending most of the movie looking normal and sounding cocky and American, and had electric mutation powers instead of magic. He even cured his appearance in the sequel!

The 2015 version was a hacker who turned into a Reaper drone lookalike from Mass Effect.

And they all rung the changes because, I believe, there’s already a perfect cinematic Doctor Doom, and if you play him straight he’ll remind cinema audiences of someone else.

Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

So the new Fox standalone Doctor Doom movie, from Legion showrunner Noah Hawley, will have to figure out how to work around that. Because only Marvel themselves (owned by Disney) could really go to the source...