Now that we’ve lost Thanos, the unifying villain of the approximately 900 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe the question has been “who will take his place?” And two big bads have been mooted that will have fans going “wait, so that would mean…”
Of course, these are rumours – indeed, they’re flights of comic-book fancy – which could be entirely invented. But they do have the ring of plausibility to them, given the benched sections of the Avengers – adieu Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow and (probably) Hulk – and the characters made available by Disney’s acquisition of the Fox stable and all the characters Marvel sold to them.
So to manage expectations, there’s been an assumption that the focus in Phase Five on some of the more recent mutant-related characters was a sign that a full X-men integration was a ways off.
But that leaves the other marquee name of the Fox-owned characters: the Fantastic Four, the cursed First Family of marvel who have yet to be successfully rendered on the screen in anything remotely satisfactory: so much so that all the Johnnys Storm – Chris Evans and Michael B. Jordan – had to reinvent themselves to get into the MCU as Captain America and Kilmonger, respectively
Why is this relevant? Because the two rumoured big bads of the next Marvel phase are Galactucus and Doctor Doom: two of the Marvelverse’s most enduring and beloved villains, and both of whom started life as antagonists for the Fantastic Four.
Doom was in all of the Fantastic Four films, while the G-banger was where the planned third Fantastic Four film would have gone had the world not gone “yeah, nah” to The Rise Of The Silver Surfer back in 2005 prior to the (ahem) doomed reboot.
Now, again, this is just a Reddit rumour right now but admit it: it all sounds like it fits around everything else we know about Phase Five, right? And hey, some of Marvel’s best big bads is just what the franchise needs.