Thanos’ Darkest AVENGERS: ENDGAME Plan Could Become Doctor Doom’s Reality

Thanos may be gone, but his final plan could be coming back in a much bigger and nastier form.

Marvel clearly wants fans looking at Avengers: Endgame differently as we head toward Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.

The upcoming Avengers: Endgame Encore re-release makes that connection pretty hard to ignore, especially since it includes four additional minutes of footage designed to bridge these stories.

Marvel wants casual audiences who haven't followed every corner of the Multiverse Saga to have an easier path into the next two Avengers movies. Recent MCU movies and Disney+ shows will certainly matter, but Endgame appears to be the movie Marvel really wants everyone thinking about.

Most of the speculation has centered on the Avengers' time-travel mission and how it might somehow lead to the creation of Doctor Doom. That's a big mystery, especially since Doom has Tony Stark's face. That strongly points toward a version of the character from another branch of the multiverse rather than Earth-616.

The more interesting connection, though, may have less to do with Doom's origin and more to do with what he ultimately plans to do.

Remember where things stood in Endgame. Thanos had erased half of all life in the universe, and the surviving Avengers traveled into the past to collect the Infinity Stones and reverse the Snap. Their mission worked, but it also brought the 2014 version of Thanos into their present.

Once Thanos realized the Avengers had undone his life's work, simply killing half the universe wasn't enough anymore. He came up with something much more extreme.

“As long as there are those that remember what was,” Thanos said, “There will always be those that are unable to accept what can be. They will resist… I will shred this universe down to its last atoms, and then… create a new one. Teeming with life, that knows not what it has lost, but only what it has been given. A grateful universe.”

Thanos wasn't talking about another Snap. He wanted to erase the entire universe and replace it. That's where things get very interesting for Doctor Doom.

The MCU's Multiverse Saga is heading directly toward Secret Wars, and Marvel Comics already gave us a version of that story that sounds remarkably similar to what Thanos described.

In 2015, Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribić brought Marvel's collapsing multiverse to its end in Secret Wars. The timelines were destroyed, but Doom survived the catastrophe and claimed all-encompasing power for himself.

Doom then created Battleworld from what remained. Battleworld was filled with people who largely had no idea what they'd lost. Their memories had been altered, and Doom ruled over this manufactured reality as its god.

To the inhabitants of Battleworld, this wasn't some broken replacement for the Marvel Universe. It was simply their world, and Doom was responsible for giving it to them.

It's essentially the endgame Thanos described before the Avengers stopped him. Destroy everything that exists, create something new in its place, remove people's knowledge of what came before, and rule over a population that doesn't understand what was taken from them.

The difference is scale. Thanos wanted to do it to one universe. Doom could do it to the entire multiverse.

That makes the path from Endgame to Doomsday and finally Secret Wars much more interesting. Doomsday could essentially put the Avengers against a villain attempting a multiversal version of Thanos' final plan. When the Avengers fail, Secret Wars will show us the result… Battleworld.

Considering the titles alone, Marvel isn't exactly hiding the fact that Doomsday is leading into Secret Wars. The big question is how closely the MCU will follow Hickman and Ribić's comic event.

If Battleworld really is where this story is headed, Thanos may have described the basic concept years before Doom ever entered the MCU.

Sure, you could argue Marvel is simply recycling an old villain's idea. That explanation becomes harder to buy, though, when Marvel is putting so much attention back on Endgame before Doomsday arrives. There could be a very specific reason audiences are being pointed toward that movie again.

It would also create a great thematic connection between the three Avengers films. Endgame introduced the horrifying idea. Doomsday could show someone actually attempting it on a much larger scale. Secret Wars could then throw the heroes into the reality created after they failed to stop it.

The comic version of Secret Wars also offers another important clue. Doom's Battleworld eventually fell apart because some people remembered the universe that existed before it. Those survivors refused to accept Doom's reality and fought to restore what had been destroyed.

Thanos understood that exact problem, when he warned: “As long as there are those that remember what was.”

Memory was the flaw in Thanos' plan, and memory was ultimately one of the weaknesses in Doom's Battleworld. If Marvel carries that idea into the MCU, a handful of heroes remembering the old multiverse could become incredibly important in Secret Wars.

Of course, Doom still needs a reason to go this far. What we've seen surrounding Doomsday suggests this version of Doom has suffered a devastating personal loss and holds the Avengers responsible.

In Marvel Comics, Victor von Doom famously tried to save the soul of his mother, Cynthia. The MCU appears to be giving its Doom a similarly personal motivation involving his family.

If Doom believes the Avengers cost him everything, rebuilding reality itself could become his answer. That also separates him from Thanos in an important way. Thanos believed his atrocities served a universal purpose.

Doom's mission may be much more personal. He could be willing to destroy countless realities because, from his perspective, the multiverse already took away the only reality that mattered to him.

Creating a new universe would allow him to bring back what he lost while deciding exactly what everyone else gets to keep.

There are still some major missing pieces. We don't know precisely how the Avengers' time travel connects to Doom, why he looks like Tony Stark, or what event will push the multiverse toward destruction. A thematic connection is compelling, but Marvel will still need a concrete story linking all of this together.

Those additional four minutes arriving with the re-release in September could provide another clue about what Marvel wants audiences to notice before Doomsday.

It might explain something about the Avengers' time travel, reveal another piece of Doom's history, or point viewers toward a moment in Endgame that suddenly carries a completely different meaning.

Whatever Marvel adds, Thanos' speech deserves another listen. Doctor Doom may be the MCU's next massive threat, but the blueprint for what he could ultimately accomplish was sitting right there in Avengers: Endgame all along.