IMPETUOUS FOOLS! Cower Before Noah Hawley’s Upcoming ‘Doctor Doom’ Solo Film!
One of the saddest aspects about the American film industry’s inexplicable inability to get the Fantastic Four right is the lack of a worthy cinematic representation of their primary foe, the menacing, megalomaniacal, mysterious Doctor Doom. He’s a great character, with all the gravitas of a disgraced royal (he rules over the fictitious kingdom of Latveria, which is not the same as Latvia, in one of my childhood’s most major disappointments) and the volatility of a man driven by revenge. His mythology — the trademark green cape and metal faceplate, his grandiloquent manner of speaking — has already inspired at least one legend in the world of music, and now the movies will finally catch up.
The big-ticket items are streaming out of San Diego Comic-Con in record numbers, and last night, Fox broke the news that they had a Doctor Doom solo film in the works. And Deadline reports that to steer this project away from whatever whirlpool of crappiness swallowed the Fantastic Four movies, they’ve hired a man I already consider to be the Doctor Doom of television, Fargo and Legion creator Noah Hawley. Hawley mentioned the plans for this project in passing at the tail end of his Legion panel, and so we have no real detail at this time apart from the fact that this exists. But Hawley’s got such a distinctive, consistent style that we can make a pretty educated guess at how it will all go down.
We open on a figure cloaked in shadow, even though the room all around him has been unnaturally lit a shade of deep crimson. As he steps out into the light, we hear the opening notes of “Just Like Honey” by the Jesus and Mary Chain. He then spends the next ninety minutes doing the Charleston to a carefully curated selection of shoegaze hits from the late ’80s and early ’90s, at which point the entire film is revealed to have been a dream. There’s some wryly bemused dark irony in there somewhere, too.