Both of Hollywood’s marquee comic book franchises are positioning the multiverse at the forefront of their continued expansion, and while we thought 2022 was the year that alternate realities became the genre’s new favorite storytelling device, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is getting the jump on the DCEU, with WandaVision set to finally kick off Phase Four and blow the mythology wide open at the same time in a matter of weeks.
Spider-Man 3 is also going to be heavily reliant on the idea of parallel timelines given the sheer volume of familiar faces being linked with a return, but Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and The Flash are still the two to beat. The former presents almost unlimited possibilities and the latter is going for broke in an attempt to restructure the entire fabric of the DCEU, with Barry Allen getting a little help from his friends in the process.
The fact that Warner Bros. have Ben Affleck, Michael Keaton and Robert Pattinson all appearing on the big screen as Batman in the space of eight months indicates that fans don’t mind having multiple versions of the same character existing at once, and we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us Don Cheadle was getting his own Disney Plus show long before Armor Wars was recently confirmed – that Marvel are planning on introducing an alternate Iron Man to fight Doctor Doom at some point in the future.
Further details on how/where this will happen remain unclear, especially with Doom still waiting on his MCU debut, although the announcement of Jon Watts’ Fantastic Four may have given us an indication of when to expect the Latverian dictator to arrive. It also hasn’t been confirmed if the Iron Man in question would be Robert Downey Jr. or someone else altogether, but the idea of having the two characters square off is being discussed internally nonetheless.