Doomsday’s Doctor Doom feels like a classic manga villain

The clock ticks ever-closer to the debut of Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, but the film surprisingly remains a mystery. Marvel still hasn’t publicly released the most recent CinemaCon trailer, though several leaks hint at an interesting parallel between Doctor Doom and Griffith from Berserk.

Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, serialized since 1989, remains one of manga’s most iconic works. Although the story is told through protagonist Guts’ eyes, the opening arc follows his exploits with the Band of the Hawk, whose silver-haired, dreamy leader often steals the limelight.

Griffith is one of those rare larger-than-life characters with a complex arc: a visionary whose dream curdles into something much darker by the end of the Golden Age. On the surface, he and Doom couldn’t be more different, but both are magnetic leaders driven by a near-religious obsession with transcendence.

Image: Dark Horse Comics/Hakusensha/Studio Gaga

Victor von Doom often pursues that through intellect and sorcery, constantly pushing past human limits. His quest for transcendence is put on full display after attaining omnipotence as God Emperor Doom in the 2015 Secret Wars storyline — a storyline set to be adapted in the sequel to Doomsday that bears the same name. Griffith’s path is far more horrifying but thematically aligned, culminating in the Eclipse, where he sacrifices everything to ascend as a member of the God Hand.

They’re on two different paths, but they follow the same philosophy: The ends justify the means.

Panel from Berserk featuring Griffith under the Eclipse.

That overlap may be key to understanding Doomsday and, more specifically, Doctor Doom’s role in it. With Anthony and Joe Russo at the helm once more — and Robert Downey Jr. stepping into Doom’s armor instead of Iron Man’s — the film is clearly aiming for a more layered antagonist, just like Thanos in Infinity War. At the heart of it is that casting twist, which seems to suggest Doom may use his appearance as a way to gain the Avengers’ trust.

Leaked descriptions of the recent CinemaCon trailer point to a fractured battlefield, with the Avengers on one side, the X-Men on the other, and Doom at the center of it all. The core idea still holds. Like Griffith, Doom may well unify these heroes under a shared cause, only to sacrifice them in pursuit of something greater. If that’s the play, Doomsday isn’t building to an all-out brawl between our favorite Marvel icons. It’s setting up a betrayal that will have devastating consequences on the entire MCU.

Marvel isn’t subtle with its Berserk influences. The series’ most infamous imagery, the aforementioned Eclipse, is already echoed in the MCU’s Incursions, those cataclysmic reality-collapsing events that feel eerily similar in both scale and symbolism.

Scene in Doctor Strange Multiverse of Madness showing an Eclipse in the background.

We’ve seen glimpses of that on-screen, most notably in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where a bleeding, eclipse-like sky looms behind Sinister Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum. Doomsday could take these elements a step further, positioning Doctor Doom as a Griffith-like figure orchestrating his own version of the Eclipse, reshaping reality into Battleworld and setting the stage for 2015’s Avengers: Secret Wars.

It’s still too early to tell if Marvel can stick the landing with Doomsday. But if they get it right, Downey’s Victor von Doom won’t just be a villain. He’ll be a believer, one willing to sacrifice everything to prove he’s right.