Noah Hawley on how he’s approaching the Doctor Doom movie

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

At last year's San Diego Comic-Con, Legion creator Noal Hawley announced that he would be developing a Doctor Doom film for 20th Century Fox, and after the studio has twice failed to bring the character to life, they'd better be hoping that the third time's the charm. While speaking with Observer, Noah Hawley spilled a few details about his approach to the Doctor Doom film, which may include making it more of a political thriller akin to CAPTAIN AMERICA: WINTER SOLDIER.

As with Legion, my thought was that the [superhero] genre has a certain kind of movie covered, but what else can the genre do. What’s interesting to me about Doom’s character is he’s the king of an Eastern European country and is there a version of this that is more of a political thriller that mixes genre? It’s something that [Captain America] Winter Soldier did really well, which was kind of make a Cold War thriller movie out of a superhero movie. This is different than that, but it does have this idea of, and I don’t want to say too much about it, but it is a mixture of genres.

Fox's previous two attempts at Doctor Doom were part of their equally disastrous attempts at bringing The Fantastic Four to the big-screen, but Noal Hawley has said that it won't be the intention of the Doctor Doom film to "re-launch the Fantastic Four franchise," but rather "to take this fascinating and under-served character and really build a movie about him where we ask the question: Is he a hero? Is he a villain? What does he really want?"

However, the upcoming acquisition of Fox by Disney could throw a wrench into Hawley's plans. "That’s not clear to me yet. I haven’t had any larger Marvel-based conversations about if they have plans for the X-Men universe or if they have plans for their other Fox-controlled comic properties," Hawley said. "I would have to imagine there’s a plan in a drawer somewhere." In FANTASTIC FOUR and FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER, the role of Doctor Doom was played by Julian McMahon, while the 2015 reboot found Toby Kebbell playing the character.

What do you folks think? Will Noah Hawley's Doctor Doom film actually happen?