The second Fantastic Four trailer is here! And it fills in some of the gaps from the first trailer, showing us how Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm wind up traveling to an alternate dimension, getting zapped with body-changing powers, and opening a door they don’t know how to close. Plus, we get our first glimpse of the fledgling team’s nemesis, Doctor Doom.
But before he’s their nemesis, it appears that Doom starts out as part of the original team. That scruffy actor you see sitting in the lab with Reed Richards (Miles Teller), claiming that Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) doesn’t take orders well? That’s Toby Kebbell, who was cast as Doom. He’s clearly suited up to join the interdimensional mission… on the other planet/realm, someone falls into a chasm, Bucky Barnes-style… and later we hear a doctor saying, “Four survived.” We know who those four are, but clearly there’s another survivor who’s been altered beyond recognition.
Kebbell himself told outlets that this iteration of Doctor Doom is programmer Victor Domashev, who takes on the online handle of “Doom.” But judging from this trailer, he starts out with some sort of relationship to Richards and co., not unlike the 2005 Fantastic Four.
Fantastic Four comes to theaters August 7.
This looks better than previous trailers. Certainly gives me more idea of what the movie will be like.
Dr Doom is from Latvia, not another dimension!
Dr. Doom is from Latveria, not Latvia!
Regardless, as the article indicated, he’s not meant to be “from another dimension”, but rather that he got changed like the Fantastic Four, and only presumed dead.
Also not his classic origin, of course, but they seem to be drawing a lot more from the Ultimate Universe where that is what happened to him, rather than the “genius who’s so vain that a tiny scar makes him put on a metal mask to hide it and he’s so stupid that he does it seconds after the mask is forged, while it’s still red hot” origin, and that would probably not go over well with today’s audiences (comics are filled with lots of stuff that makes no sense that fans just accept because the 60s were weird).
The version with the tiny scar leading Doom to damage his face dates from the 80s, though. The 60s comics always imply that the explosion he got caught in heavily damaged his face, I think Kirby later suggested (in interviews, not by writing it into a story) that Doom only ever had a tiny scar but took it as a massive affront, and it was John Byrne who combined the two the way you describe.
I’d have rather liked to see the country-ruling, melodramatic Doom put onscreen now comic book movies seem a bit more friendly to that sort of grand-scale stuff, but I hope this version works too.
It seems like every time we replace the cast with a new one, the compulsion is to tell the origin story (or AN origin story anyway) over again. A reboot of a series requires it by some inter-dimensional law. Frankly, it’s annoying. Why not just let it be a given that the F4 exist and proceed from there? And Superman. And Batman. And…and…and…ad nauseum. The origin of Antman coming soon. Kill me now.