After season 1 of Legion blew my mind, I’m ready to saddle up with whatever Noah Hawley decides to make next. So, it’s with a huge sense of anticipation that we’re learning more about his Doctor Doom movie. The project is still very much in the planning stages and hasn’t been greenlit yet, but Hawley is talking a big game of mixed genres and political tension.
In an interview with Observer, he set out his pitch by explaining:
“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?”
Latverian power struggles based on the concept of a challenger to the throne of almighty Doom? Hell yes! He continued by saying:
“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. The mandate is not to re-launch the Fantastic Four franchise as much as it is 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?”
Whatever Hawley does it’s all but guaranteed to improve upon the previous big-screen incarnations of the character, as played by Julian McMahon in the 2005/2007 Fantastic Four films and Toby Kebbell’s take in the 2015 reboot. Neither of those really captured the grandiosity and vision of Doctor Doom, one of the Marvel Universe’s A-list bad guys. As opposed to a lot of other villains, Doom has a weird moral complexity to him that hasn’t really been explored in any films featuring the iconic character to date.
Only one thing stands in Hawley’s way now – Disney’s acquisition of Fox’s IP, which would include the Fantastic Four rights and therefore Doctor Doom. Apparently, the writer knows as much as we do about that, explaining:
“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. I would have to imagine there’s a plan in a drawer somewhere,”
C’mon Kevin Feige. You’ve said you want to explore new corners of the MCU, so why not let Noah Hawley loose in Latveria with Doctor Doom and see what happens?
Published: Mar 22, 2018 07:31 pm