Doctor Doom Just Revealed his Biggest Weakness (Which Has to Be in the MCU)

Doctor Doom has become emperor of the world, and despite all of the heroes’ attempts to stop him, he’s always managed to stay one step ahead and beat them at every turn. Still, the Fantastic Four were never going to take Doom’s rule lying down, and set out to bring down their adversary. It looked like they finally beat him, until Doom revealed how he kept winning. Whenever the heroes beat Doom, he would use his magic as Sorcerer Supreme to reset the timeline to before they fought, with Doom keeping all of his memories. He could reset a near-infinite number of times until he won, and nobody had any idea it wasn’t the first time.

Doom had a perfect recipe for victory, because any time someone figured anything out or got the upper hand, he could just immediately turn back to a prior save state. All he had to do was not mess anything up. And yet, in classic Doctor Doom fashion, he did. Fantastic Four (2025) #3 showed us not only exactly how Marvel’s First Family took away Doom’s biggest advantage, but also how his biggest weakness is what caused his loss. This weakness is the cause of all of his losses, and it is the most essential part of his character. Doom’s downfall all started when, instead of winning, he chose to gloat.

A Perfect Victory Thrown Out for His Ego

When Doom reset after the Fantastic Four beat him, he explained exactly what he was doing, bragging that they couldn’t do anything to stop him. In that fraction of a second, Sue sent their Time Sled to the family before they attacked Doom with a message engraved on it. Their past selves pieced together what Doom was doing, and tracked down the device that let him do this to Antarctica. Of course, Emperor Doom himself appeared to stop them from tampering with the machine, and Reed discovered that if they destroyed the time engine it would destroy all of time and space, and Doom thought he’d won once again, and started to gloat. While he ran through the speech that he must have given the Four hundreds of times whenever he reset everything, Johnny had an idea. Instead of destroying the engine, they turned Doom’s reset points into his saves.

When the Thing got a good hit against Doom, he reset time, only to be sent back to exactly when Ben hit him. Doom realized what they’d done, but he had a fraction of a second to respond before Thing took him out, so he kept resetting time, trying to find a way to avoid the punch. Over and over, he reset for a millenia’s worth of time, until the engine burnt itself out, and Ben’s punch landed for the final time. Although Doom managed to escape, his guaranteed victories had been destroyed and he couldn’t cheat anymore. And honestly, he has no one to blame but himself.

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Doom Is the Pettiest, Most Egotistical Man Imaginable

There’s no reason for someone with unlimited retries to ever actually lose a fight, and yet Doom found a way. He lost the moment he decided to brag about it to his worst enemies, giving them a chance to respond. All he had to do was say nothing, reset, and win, but Doom could not stop himself from lording over how he beat his worst enemies, even if the only versions of them that knew it were about to be erased forever. I mean, he literally called Mister Fantastic an idiot for telling him how they escaped Doom’s trap, and then immediately explained how he was trapping them. 

Doom’s biggest weakness has always been his ego. He buys into his own hype so much that the very fact that Reed is smarter than him burns him worse than the Human Torch ever could. If he swallowed his pride even once he could beat the Fantastic Four, but he can’t. Doom will take any and every opportunity to lord himself over the FF to prove that he’s better than them, and every single time it bites him in the butt. But that flaw is what makes Doom so interesting. Everyone knows that Doom is his own worst enemy except for Doom, and his adamant rejection of that fact, his unbelievable ego, has always been the thing that’s driven him to villainy in the first place. He’s a fantastic villain because he’s so capable and pathetic at the same time, and we love him for it.

Doom’s fragile yet massive ego is an essential part of his character that has to be included in every adaptation of him, especially in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If he isn’t arrogant to the nth degree, then he isn’t Doctor Doom. What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!