ScreenCrush: The Podcast! - Ultron Predicted the Rise of RDJ's Doctor Doom

Episode Date: June 15, 2025

Go back and watch Avengers: Age of Ultron, and think about the multiverse saga. Why does Ultron hate Tony Stark and the Avengers so much? We think it's because he foresaw the inevitable turn of Tony Stark becoming Doctor Doom.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I'm Ryan Erie. And we think that in Avengers Age of Ultron, Ultron actually saw the multiverse. And in the multiverse, he saw Robert Downey Jr.'s Dr. Doom. But that's not all. saw Doom's predecessor and fellow Avengers-level threat, Kang the Conqueror. And we think that Ultron even calculated the rise of mutant kind. And don't worry, this is not some random theory. We brought receipts, so let's get started.

But first, I want to remind you guys that we are available in all your favorite podcast platforms and check out our merch store for fun parody merch like Tony Stark granting life to Ultron. You can find links for those below, and if you become a member, you get free stuff. So Ultron hated Tony Stark and the Avengers. Stark is he's a sickness. There's only one path to peace. The Avengers extinction. But that movie didn't do the best job of explaining explicitly why he hates them.

But a few years ago, we did a video where we broke down the vision that Ultron has, where he sees all of history and the Avengers place within it. And in that video, we talked about how when Ultron absorbed the entire internet and saw that Tony Stark went from becoming a weapons manufacturer who makes weapons for others to making a single weapon for his own pleasure, Ultron saw the hypocrisy in this. And he saw that Tony's hubris and ego would ultimately doom the planet because he was not a good steward of the Earth.

Ultron calculated this continuous never-ending loop of war beginning peace and peace begetting war, and he saw that this eternal back and forth was ultimately going to doom the entire planet to existence. Ultron, like his creator, is a futurist. He took all this information and then calculated probable paths forward. And we think that he saw what is destined to happen in not only doomsday in secret wars, but also beyond the multiverse saga. Altron recognizes himself as what Tony Stark feared most.

Everyone creates the thing they dread. And this sentiment is echoed by the Vision in Civil War when he states that Tony Stark and the Avengers are directly responsible for the escalation of impending doom. I'm saying there may be a causality. And it was also in Age of Ultron, right before Vision kills him, that Vision agrees with Ultron that humanity is doomed.

They're doomed. Yes. Ultron read the Avengers like a book. He rebuked Cap as the soldier who couldn't live without a war. He dressed down Thor for confusing peace with quiet, but most importantly, he saw Tony Stark as the arrogant madman who couldn't help but meddle. I don't want to hear the man was not meant to meddle mentally. So let's start with Ultron's creation that I alluded to earlier.

On a mission to obtain Loki's Scepter, which remember was housing the mine stone, one of the six infinity stones, there we see Wanda tap into Tony's mind using what we now know is chaos magic. At the time, Wanda and her brother Pietro were on Team Hydra, and their new powers were unlocked by direct exposure to the mine stone. Notice I said unlocked and not be stoned upon, and keep that in mind for later. Anyways, the mine stone not only unlocked Wanda and Pietro's dormant powers, but it also unlocked and opened the metaphysical door inside the mind of Tony Stark, showing him his own destiny.

Remember, it has been well established that in the MCU, dreams are a peak into the multiverse. Dreams are windows into the lives of our multiversal cells. And we think the same is true for the nightmarish visions that Wanda puts the Avengers through in Age of Ultron. Well, except Hawkeye. control thing. Not a fan. So all of these visions that Wanda invoked on our heroes ended up becoming true. Thor saw a vision of Ragnarok, and of course we saw that in Thor Ragnarok, and he also saw the emergence of Thanos in the events of Infinity War. Right, he did? Yeah, we did a whole video about it. Remember, he says that he sees a swirling vortex and in the middle is that, the minestone,

in the center of vision's head. And where was the mindstone on the infinity gauntlet? In the center. So Thor's vision in an age of Ultron was essentially showing him the events of Infinity War. He even saw the Infinity Gauntlet. Natasha saw the Red Room and we saw her return to the red room to face her past in the Black Widow movie. And Steve saw himself dancing with Peggy, a dance that would come back into play in Avengers Endgame when he traveled to another universe to live out his life with her. And in Wanda Vision, we get a flashback to Before Age of Ultron, where Wanda is shown a vision from the Mindstone of her own future self as the Scarlet Witch. And we think that what Ultron saw when he awoke for the first time was his own Mindstone Vision.

too much. So with all of these visions coming true and with the Mindstone having access to the multiverse and there being an entire department dedicated to nightmares at the TVA, This place is a nightmare. What's another department? We think it is safe to say that the mindstone has the ability to access the multiverse and the vision that Tony saw and the vision that Ultron saw are both still destined to happen. Tony's vision of his dead friends in the invasion of Earth is what pushes him over the edge and amplifies his PTSD that we saw on Iron Man 3, sending Tony down a path that we now know is the path to becoming Dr. Doom and Ultron saw this coming. And no, we don't mean that Tony and Ultron both literally saw a vision of Tony putting on a green cape and changing his name to Doom.

We mean that they saw the macro-level vague silhouette and suggestion of the threat to come. At the end of Iron Man 3, Tony says he's done. You know what to do. The clean slate protocol, sir? Screwed, it's Christmas. Yes. But come age of Ultron, he's right back in the mix. And this shows that Tony is the embodiment of this doom cycle of. peace and war that Ultron talks about.

Men of peace create engines of war. Tony is incapable of breaking his own destructive pattern. He's an obsessive meddler with an only I can fix it mentality. Now at the time of this vision, we thought it was setting up Thanos, and to a degree it was, but Thanos was just a step on the stairway to doom. The whole point of this vision was to tell Tony that if he didn't stop meddling and creating problems to be solved, everyone in everything would die. This inspired him to create Ultron, to win the war before it

begins, and to give Tony and the Avengers the ability to retire. What if you were sipping margaritas on a sunranged beach, turn him brown instead of green? But after the vision, Tony learns the exact wrong lesson. And then Ultron, my fault. And even after Tony supposedly learns the right lesson later in the film, in Civil War and Endgame, he goes right back to his preventionist mentality. That what we needed was a pseudo-armor around the world, remember that? Whether it impacted our precious freedoms or not, that's what we need. This is the flaw in Tony Stark that makes him no different from Dr. Doom.

He can't keep the beast at bay. Wanda Solid. Ultron can't tell the difference between saving the world and destroying it. Where do you think he gets that? Steve's solid. Every time someone tries to win a war before it starts, innocent people die. And Ultron Solid. You want to protect the world, but you don't want it to change.

How is humanity saved if it's not allowed to evolve? So in his vision, Tony saw himself surround a world. by his dead friends on a floating asteroid in space, and when he wakes Steve, he says, You could have saved him us. Now, of course, with the Chutari worms flying around, it's implied that the Avengers were slain by Thanos, but this floating rock in space may not be the asteroid we've seen Thanos chilling on before. It could instead be the asteroid at the end of time, the same asteroid that he who remains Citadel rested on at the center of existence, and that's the same

asteroid where Loki's throne sits as he holds together the vines of usigril, the multiversal tree. Hear me out. This whole vision could have been a misdirect as a Thanos tease, but in hindsight, it was a doom tease. This film was never about how Thanos would destroy the world, but how Tony would destroy the universe. And in this vision, we don't see a dead Tony lying around with his fellow Avengers, implying that Tony either isn't there or that he was the one who killed the Avengers to begin with. Maybe they were there protecting Loki, which would be super poetic since Tony is standing in front of Loki's Scepter. And in the first Avengers movie, Loki says this. How will your friends have time for me when they're so busy fighting you?

And the reason we're seeing that Chutari Leviathans could be a hint that we're going to see one of the most badass things Doom has ever done in the comics brought to the big screen, ripping out Thanos's spine. And there's something really cool about the idea that the same army that caused Tony's greatest fears in his PTSD, that army now will become his army. So anyways, Wanda allows Stark to leave with the 7th. because she realized that Tony Stark will single-handedly destroy not only of the Avengers, but himself. He will be his own doom. And remember at the time, Wanda really hated Stark.

Or why? Because she was an early victim of Tony's reckless attempts at making the world a safer place. We learned that her and her brother's hate for Tony stems from this scene that we actually got to see in Wanda vision. Now, Wanda does ultimately turn on Ultron, and she embraces Stark and the event. as the lesser evil. But not for long. When she joins the Avengers, the team is being led by Steve, not Tony. And when Tony comes back into the picture in Civil War, she's pretty quick to defect from the team and join Steve in his fight against Tony. Tony, who is yet again trying to control everything. You locked me in my room. Okay, first, that's an exaggeration. When Wanda let Tony leave with the Scepter, the idea was that he would destroy himself and the Avengers on his own.

But I saw Stark's fear. I knew it would control him, make himself distract. But little did she know that Tony self-destruction didn't simply mean his eminent death as we saw an endgame. It also meant the creation of Dr. Doom. In the same way that Darth Vader destroyed Anakin Skywalker, Dr. Doom would destroy Tony Star. And the Russo brothers, the directors of Doom's Dan's Secret Wars, have confirmed that Tony Snap and Endgame is directly connected to Robert Downey Jr. having to play Dr. Doom. I mean, yeah, makes sense. Dr. Doom's got a messed up face and so does Tony after the snap. Right. So Tony may have sacrificed his life in Endgame, but we have to remember how many Dan rules he broke to do this. He created time travel, he tampered with the fabric of reality,

and he risked the collapse of everything. He goes against his own stern warning that he gives to Ant Man just a few scenes earlier. I believe the most likely outcome will be our collective demise. He, just like Thanos, gathered the Infinity Stones to enact his will on the universe. And what pushed him to do it? His own selfish desire to bring back Peter Parker and to undo what he views as his biggest failure. The Avengers have no debate on the dangers of meddling with time. of the nasty branching realities that would come into being. No talk of the implications of spontaneously bringing back half of all life five years later. None of that was discussed.

And that's because, even though Tony has noble intentions, at his core, he has egotistical tendencies. And while the Avengers may have undone the snap, they simultaneously doomed the multiverse. Tony is a problem-solving hammer who only sees nails. He briefly left good enough alone during the five years of the blip, but Steve and the Avengers pulled him right back in. Just when I thought I was out,

They pull me back in. Ultron saw Tony's ability to create problems just so he would have something to solve. Similar to Ultron's accusation towards Steve Rogers. Captain America. God's righteous man pretending you could live without a war. Ultron saw that Tony can't live without a crisis to solve. And he saw Tony's inability to just stop. Because the truth is I don't want to stop.

This never-ending cycle of peace and war within Tony and throughout the universe and multiverse is a theme that perfectly plays into the entire thesis of this saga, a never-ending cycle of recurring events, a snake eating its own tail. The end creating the beginning and the beginning leading to the end. And Tony Doom perfectly represents the pattern that Ultron saw in his creator. So wait a minute, when you say that Ultron saw the multiverse, do you mean like he saw a portal into the multiverse like in Word If?

No, look, not exactly. When people like Kang and Dr. Strange Wanda and even the leader in Captain America Brave New World saw the multiverse, they saw the multiverse in terms of probabilities. To view alternate futures, to see all the possible outcomes of the coming conflict. See, there's a thought in quantum mechanics that if there's an infinite number of probabilities in the multiverse, then for all we know, there are an infinite number of realities. But we'll never actually be able to travel to them. But theoretically, these realities do exist. Ultron is a supercomputing artificial intelligence, and there is no doubt in my mind that just like

those others, Ultron could easily crunch the numbers and see what was to come. He could see what Tony was destined to become. Ultron may not have physically seen Tony Stark donning a green cloak and changing his name to Doom, but what he did see was bigger than that. He saw a probability storm. It's a probability storm. Every choice you could make existing all it was.

Now while Kang may have physically seen other universes beyond his own, Ultron saw the overwhelming likelihood of imminent destruction. In a way, Ultron saw a more true version of the multiverse than Kang did because Kang saw the multiverse that was, while Ultron saw the multiverse that could, be and would be. Or what about and what if when Ultron had to get all those infinity stones to become aware of the multiverse? There are universes beyond my own.

Well, that Ultron existed in the current version of the multiverse being overseen by Loki, whereas our Ultron from the mainline MCU was existing in a multiverse run by He Who Remains, the Sacred Timeline. It says so in the MCU timeline book. Exactly. One is in an infinite multiverse and one is in a contained multiverse. And like we said a moment ago, our Ultron didn't see the actual physical parallel universes like Kang did, but Ultron saw was a multiverse of infinite possibilities, all leading toward a bitter and catastrophic end,

and he saw Tony and the Avengers at the center of it all. Once again, playing into our theory that Tony's vision and age of Ultron literally takes place at the center of everything, the asteroid at the end of time. And we think that the end that Ultron foresaw is coming in Avengers Doomsday, and when Robert Downey Jr.'s, Dr. Doom, accompanied by his own Avengers, winds up destroying the MCU. You blow it up! And apart from Doom being the villain of the film, Doomsday is a perfect title because

it will likely be the doomsday that Tony and Ultron fear. Now, to Doug's point, and what if season three, we do see an Infinity Ultron, an Infinity Ultron who eradicated all life in his universe to keep it from crumbling. Ultron's mission was peace, and he sees that the only path to peace is the eradication of not only Tony and the Avengers, but all of life in the universe. Everything must go so that we can start again. I think a lot about meteors, the purity of them, boom, the end, start again. Ultron saw the doomed nature of humanity and how they were going to bring the universe down with them.

And that's why he insisted that we must evolve if we're to break the puppet strings that bound us. You're all puppets, tangled in strings. You could even make the argument that Ultron saw not only doom, but he who remains, the puppet master of the sacred timeline, and this would mean that Ultron saw the need to break this cycle before Doom could break it beyond repair. Wait a minute, how would he see He Who Remains? Well, it's simple.

If there's an infinite multiverse, then it would mean that there's an infinite number of possibilities for other universes to invade. But the fact that other universes didn't invade means that Ultron would then rightly deduce that there was somebody preventing that invasion from happening. In other words, a God pulling all the strings, and that God in this case is He Who Remains.

Because, remember, Age of Ultron takes place when there was still a united sacred timeline. Nevertheless, we do think that Ultron was able to see that Tony's destructive tendencies would make him a villain and not a hero. We used to think that Ultron was trying to stop Thanos, but actually, Thanos and Ultron have a lot in common. Ultron would say that Thanos's snap was a step in the right direction, but that it was a half measure. No more half measures, Walter. Whereas Thanos from Endgame had more of a full measure approach. I know what I must do. I will shred this unit.

down to its last atom, and then create a new one. We think that Ultron was more in the middle of these two Thanos. He saw the need to erase all life, but he wanted to preserve the universe. So in order to do that, he not only needed to stop Tony from defeating Thanos and bringing back all the people he had dusted, but Ultron also needed Tony to stop creating time travel and opening the door to the multiverse. Ultron's mission, after all, was to be a suit of armor around the world. But we think that Ultron may have also seen a theoretical likelihood

that Tony could obtain the power of the infinity stones, but not die. And had Tony not died after snapping his fingers in endgame, it's terrifying to think what he might have become. I could easily see him opting to not return the infinity stones, not caring about the dark timelines that it would create. Tony would think that with this power, he could solve the threats from those dark timelines. He would look in the mirror every day

and see the face scars left behind from the last time his world was threatened, and this would allow him to justify never letting go of this power as a way to keep their world safe. a face scar like Dr. Doom. Exactly. And this absolute power would eventually corrupt him as absolute power corrupts absolutely. And Tony's refusal to return the stones and the dark multiverse that decision would create would come back to haunt him and destroy all of reality. And then Tony Doom's failure to save the multiverse, he would instead avenge it with the creation

of his own utopia within the void, aka battle world like we see in the Secret Wars comics. Now, while this isn't ultimately what happened in our universe, it could have very well happened in another. And that's how Robert Downey Jr. is back and in the role of Dr. Doom. And like Doug said, he'll have his gnarly face scar and the power of six Infinity Stones. And guys, look, this isn't fan fiction. The Russo brothers have explicitly said that Tony Snap and Endgame is directly connected to Robert Downey Jr.'s doom. And that's just where the story begins. And again, going back to what if season three, in the finale of that show, we see Infinity Ultron realize that there is no peace without life and no life without conflict, pushing him to have a face turn and help Captain Carter

and her team save the watcher. And we see Ultron fighting off the other watchers and helping to liberate the multiverse, allowing for it to become even bigger and free-flowing. For a garden to thrive, it must be cultivated. And as Ultron is fighting them off, he says, It's what I was programmed for. Ultron's mission at its core was to usher in a new take on life, a next chapter following his genocide. And while we aren't sitting here saying that Ultron is a good guy, we are saying that his mission he embarked on in age of Ultron is still in motion. And with Ultron returning in the upcoming show Vision quest, maybe he'll get to finish that mission by teaming up with not only his old friend Vision, but also Wanda Maximoff in the fight against

doom and the creation of a new universe, the evolved world that Ultron spoke of. The world made clean for the new man to rebuild. What do you mean? Well, Ultron not only saw the impending doom that the MCU had coming, but we think he also foresaw the rise of mutants. When Wanda and Pietro were introduced to the MCU and Age of Ultron, Marvel didn't yet have the rights to use mutants in their movies, but Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were an exception to this rule. These two characters were in a legal gray zone where they could be used by the Fox in their X-Men movies or by Marvel Studios in the Avengers movies. The one catch is they couldn't technically call them mutants. Now, I tell you this because Ultron didn't let that stop him from heavily implying that Wanda and her brother were mutants.

No, I don't. Ultron is straight up saying that there's something special about Wanda and Pietro, claiming that they are the next stage in human evolution. He says earlier in the film, How is humanity saved if it's not allowed to evolve? And then, in his confrontation with Wanda, he says, The human race will have every opportunity to improve. All of this talk of human evolution, especially in the presence of Wanda Maximoff,

a mutant and the daughter of Magneto in the comics, it immediately made me think of this. Mankind has evolved since then. Yes, and to us. We are the future, Charles, not them. Ultron also says in this scene, When the earth starts to settle, God throws a stone at it.

And believe me, he's winding up. At the time, this seemed like a reference to Thanos. But now it makes far more sense that it was a reference to Doom. Ultron saw that if Tony and the Avengers went unchecked, eventually we would get the arrival of Dr. Doom, who, like in the comics, would destroy the multiverse and build an, empire in the void, proving Ultron's fears to be true. Ultron is trying to prevent this

from happening. He may not know the exact details of what's to come, but he knows it ends with the destruction of everything, down to the very last atom. So Ultron views his control demolition as merciful, similar to Thanos and even He Who Remains. That's the gambit. Stifling order or cataclysmic chaos. They would all cease to exist, and I call that mercy. Best villains are the ones who think that they're right, and that's what's so great about Ultron and what will be great about Robert Downey Jr.'s Dr. Doom. We love villains who think they're the heroes of their own stories.

And like in the Secret Wars comics, after the multiverse is destroyed and Doom takes over, we think that our heroes will ultimately defeat Doom and the MCU will be rebuilt as one cohesive universe where all of Marvel's characters are now under one roof, such as the Fantastic Four and, of course, the Mutants. And we think that Wanda is going to have a huge, role in creating this new reality. And if that happens, it would mean that Ultron was spot on in his prediction that Tony Stark would destroy the world. And he was right about an evolved humanoid like Wanda Maximoff, a mutant being the key to saving the world. And that is super poetic because the next saga is very likely going to be called the mutant saga. And that's

perfect because in a lot of ways, this saga will be an evolved, mutated, if you will, version of the MCU. And it looks like we'll have Ultron to thank for it. Here, here. So let us know your thoughts on this down in the comments below, or you can at me on Twitter, Blue Sky Threads, or find me and Colton on our free-to-join Discord server. And if it's your first time here, please subscribe, smash that bell for alerts. For Screen Crush, I'm Ryan Erie.