The Hollywood Reporter got some tidbits of new info from Marvel head Kevin Feige as he spoke with reporters for the upcoming release of The Fantastic Four: First Steps. In fact, the Fantastic Four and Disney’s acquisition of Fox were some of the big reasons that they started shifting focus towards Doctor Doom and away from Kang. He doesn’t even bring up Jonathan Majors by name — instead referring to him as “the actor.” Feige explained,
We had started even before what had happened to the actor happened, we had started to realize that Kang wasn’t big enough, wasn’t Thanos, and that there was only one character that could be that, because he was that in the comics for decades and decades. Because of the Fox acquisition, we finally had it, and it was Dr. Doom. So we had started talking about Dr. Doom even before we officially pivoted from Kang. And in fact, I had started talking with Robert [Downey Jr.] about this audacious idea before Ant-Man 3 even came out. It was a long plan that we had, to take one of our greatest characters and utilize one of our greatest actors.”
The fandom of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was both pleasantly surprised and confused when Robert Downey Jr. was announced to return to the Avengers franchise, not as Tony Stark, but as the famous comic villain, Doctor Doom. Previously, Downey revealed that Feige came to him a couple of years ago with the idea, saying, “Susan and I were sitting down with Feige at one point, and he said, ‘It just keeps occurring to me that, if you were to come back…’ […] And he brought up Victor von Doom, and I looked into [the] character, and I was like, ‘Wow.’ And later on, he goes, ‘Let’s get Victor von Doom right. Let’s get that right.’“
Feige also updated folks on the whole Blade situation. He reveals that it’s still cooking and joked about why it had been delayed, saying, “The obstacle was Ryan Coogler called and said, ‘We’d love some costumes for Sinners.’ And we said, ‘Take them, man.’ He’s our good friend, take our costumes. We’ll hold off on the movie.” He’s, of course, playing off of the reports that Sinners bought their period costumes from a past Blade production. Feige explained that there has have been four takes that was attempted for the Blade script. Two were period pieces and two were modern day, but they have finally “landed on modern day.” And he confirms Mahershala Ali is still attached.
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