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The best news about the recent announcement that Doctor Doom is coming to the MCU as part of 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday isn’t that Robert Downey Jr. is going to play the character, or even that we will more than likely get to see Doctor Doom take on the Avengers on the big screen. (Can we get a Doctor Doom/Spider-Man scene? That would be wonderful, thank you very much.) Instead, it’s that bringing Doctor Doom into the Marvel Cinematic Universe means that we might, finally, get a comic-accurate Doctor Doom in a movie — and that is what cinema needs more than anything else right now.

Here’s the thing about Victor Von Doom, who I firmly believe is one of the finest comic book villains of all time: I get that he’s a bad ass, I get that he’s dangerous and needs to be treated as the true threat he really is, but there’s a hidden quality about the character that has perpetually been overlooked not just by filmmakers bringing him to the screen, but also by a number of comic book creators seeking to fashion their own take on the villain for contemporary audiences — Victor Von Doom is gloriously, utterly ridiculous. And this is, honestly, his greatest strength.

Doctor Doom is, when done right, high camp. He’s the villain who wines and dines his foes, because he wants them to be impressed by how cultured he is before kills them; he’s so egotistical that he has attempted to romance both the Invisible Woman and Storm of the X-Men because, hey, what woman wouldn’t want a despot daddy? He’s a man who wears a full suit of armor at seemingly all times because his face was scarred when he was younger, despite having multiple opportunities — through his own super-science or his own magic, because remember, Doctor Doom can do both — to change that throughout the years; clearly, he’s just so extra that he likes wearing armor all the time.

Moreover, thanks to the gift that is Stan Lee’s idiosyncratic writing style, Doctor Doom is a villain whose dialogue is consciously overblown, and given to not just a great rhetorical flourish, but taking every opportunity to talk about himself in the third person, while referring to others as fools, dolts, and clods. There is actual canon where he says the line, “And now, it is time to give my other ‘assistants’ their reward… in the typical Doctor Doom manner!” which is, let’s be honest, absolutely magical. (It’s in 1964’s Fantastic Four #23, if you’re curious.)

All of the above might sound surprising to anyone who’s only come across Doctor Doom in the previous big screen Fantastic Four movies. Those versions of Doom were self-consciously toned down, and as a result, depressingly generic and endlessly more boring that the comic book version of the character. We’ve seen a variation of this before, with Sony’s two separate versions of a cinematic Spider-Man before Marvel Studios got involved; as much as people might have enjoyed either Tobey Maguire’s or Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parkers, they were were both missing something that felt difficult to define… until Tom Holland’s MCU version of the hero showed up onscreen.

Fidelity to the source material is something that Marvel Studios likes to boast when it comes to bringing characters to the screen, and Spider-Man (and, for that matter, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and more) are fine demonstrations of that boast. What little we’ve seen of The Fantastic 4: First Steps suggests that similar care is being taken with the MCU version of those characters, and so perhaps we’re really about to get a Doctor Doom on screen that matches the utterly, beautifully over-the-top comic book version that fans (me very much included) have loved for decades. More than anything else about Doom’s third chance at big screen fame, this is the thing I want to see.

No offense, Ben Grimm.

Want more? Make sure you've read our list of all the best Marvel Comics stories of all time, and the most powerful Marvel Comics characters (yes, you can debate in the comments!).