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It all started roughly a year ago, when Kevin Feige announced that Robert Downey Jr. would return to the MCU to portray Doctor Doom—a fan-favorite villain long rumored to be the next big bad. At the time, this news seemed to signal a pivot, but insiders suggest that plans have been anything but firm. The Marvel machine shifted gears dramatically following missteps with recent projects, notably Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which underperformed at the box office, and the fallout from Jonathan Majors' legal issues, which cast doubt on his pivotal role as Kang.