Leaked Avengers Doomsday Photos Reportedly Confirm Doctor Strange Joined Doctor Doom's Coven, Wanda Theorized to Follow

Over the weekend a new batch of leaked photos from Avengers Doomsday surfaced, and they reportedly confirm some older leaks I have been sitting on for months. Between high-res looks at Doctor Doom's coven of witches, first teased at San Diego Comic-Con, and a new photo of a character rumored to be called Boris, I am now convinced these older leaks are real.

Leaked photos reportedly confirm the masked character Boris is Doctor Strange

The character rumored to be called Boris has a third eye on his forehead, and word for a while now is that this is Doctor Doom's wizard ally, Doctor Strange. Not just any Strange, but our Strange, the Doctor Strange of Universe 616, the mainline MCU, last seen with Clea in the post credit scene of Multiverse of Madness where she tells him "you caused an incursion, and we're going to fix it."

This is not the first photo I've seen of Boris. A while back I was sent an image described to me as an AI recreation, made both to enhance the photo and to avoid copyright claims from Marvel since these are recreations rather than the originals. That photo shows Doctor Doom and Boris standing outside a red energy force field housing what is rumored to be the stolen heart of God Loki.

According to reports and other leaks, Doctor Doom has ripped Loki's heart from his chest and stolen his newfound power to control the multiverse. As I understand it, Boris's job is to protect that heart and keep it functioning through sorcery, possibly using it to hold the fabric of the multiverse together after it was torn from Loki's chest, while Doom uses the heart's power to enact his plan of multiversal reconstruction. In the Secret Wars comics Doctor Strange serves as Doom's right hand man, something also depicted in early concept art for the Secret Wars movie.

Why I think Clea's post credit scene sets up Doctor Strange joining Doom

I have speculated for a while, along with others, that Clea will be revealed to have already been serving Doctor Doom and that she recruited Strange at Doom's request. Strange is a hero and a good man, but he is not without flaws and he is very logic driven. We hear him say multiple times in Spider-Man: No Way Home that in the grand calculus of the multiverse, the sacrifice of variants means infinitely more than their individual lives.

Avengers Doomsday is shaping up as a trolley problem between Doctor Doom's logic and Steve Rogers' morals

I've talked for a while now about Avengers Doomsday essentially being a big trolley problem, the classic scenario where a train is about to hit three people but you can pull a lever to divert it onto one person instead. Do you pull the lever and save more lives while taking one, or refuse to interfere even if it means more people die? That question, applied to an incursion where two universes are on a collision course, is what I expect our heroes to face.

Doctor Strange, like Doctor Doom, will likely believe logic rules supreme, that destroying some worlds to save others is the moral and logical path when the alternative is everyone dying. Steve Rogers, on the other hand, will likely take a "we don't trade lives" approach, refusing to destroy another universe even at the cost of certain death for everyone. We saw this in Infinity War when Steve refused to let them kill Vision and destroy the Mind Stone, even though doing so would have stopped Thanos before he could snap half of reality out of existence, and it was teased earlier in Age of Ultron when Steve says "we'll lose" and "we'll do that together, too."

I fully expect Steve to give a speech in Doomsday about fighting to the bitter end to find another way that doesn't involve killing other worlds, and when characters like Strange, Doom, or maybe Reed, Magneto, or Xavier respond with "we'll lose, we'll die," Steve will hit them with that same line. I respect Steve's refusal to break from his moral code, that's who he is at his core, but I can also see well intentioned characters like Reed, Xavier, and Magneto pushing back, arguing that saving some lives is better than saving none. I think that philosophical debate layered on top of the punching and blasting is going to be really compelling.

Doom's coven of witches: who is behind the purple, green, and gold masks

Doom's cult of Latverian witches includes a purple witch, a green witch, and an orange, gold, or warm yellow witch. The purple one is the most obvious to me, that is Charlize Theron's Clea returning to serve as one of Doom's witches, period, end of story.

The green witch is trickier. Doom himself wears green, which makes me wonder if there's a connection, maybe romantic, or maybe she leads the witch coven. It could be revealed she is Doom's mother, whom he saves from hell in the comics, freeing his mother from hell being one of Doom's defining arcs. In a stack of AI recreated leaks I've been sitting on, I spotted the exact same tapestry that appeared in an officially released Comic-Con poster, and that match is one of the big things that convinced me these leaks are real, though whether the tapestry depicts a young Doom and his mother or Doom's wife and son, I'm not sure.

My money is actually on Sylvie for the green witch. She already wears green, she's a Loki variant, and green is already associated with time in the MCU. My hesitation is why she would work with Doom after he killed Loki and took his heart, unless she doesn't yet know Doom betrayed and killed him. I could see Doom approaching her after the Loki series finale, telling her the timeline is still on a collision course, and Sylvie agreeing to help without realizing she's being used, only to turn on Doom once she learns the truth.

The yellow, orange, or reddish witch could be the Ancient One, who knows time and the multiverse well, was the first MCU character to mention the multiverse, and played a role in the Avengers' time heist in Endgame, something Doomsday is expected to draw on heavily.

Could Wanda Maximoff be hiding among Doctor Doom's witches?

The witch everyone is really pulling for is Wanda, the Scarlet Witch. I've said for a long time that Wanda is not dead. Mount Wundagore collapsed on her by her own doing, but as it fell we saw a red blast, and that same scarlet witch stone relief later turned up in the void in Deadpool and Wolverine, which makes me think Wanda may have pruned herself from existence and ended up there because she judged herself too dangerous to exist in a universe. From there, Doom could find her during his exploration of the multiverse and bring her onto his team to save the multiverse his way.

I don't want to see Wanda take another villainous turn or get corrupted by the Darkhold or Doom's dark magic again. I want a Wanda who is genuinely trying to do the right thing. Other options include the Wanda from Earth 838, whose reality may have collapsed after the incursion that started following Multiverse of Madness, or a Wanda from the Doomsday X-Men universe who could be Magneto's daughter. Regardless of which version she is, I do think Wanda ends up part of Doom's coven, though there could also be a fourth, red robed witch we simply haven't seen yet.

How I expect the unmasking to play out at the end of Avengers Doomsday

It seems very clear to me that the Boris character with the third eye mask is our Doctor Strange. It could technically be a variant, but I doubt it and I hope it isn't. I hope this is our Strange who has genuinely come to believe he needs to work with Doom to save the multiverse, the same way I hope it's true for Wanda and the others. I don't want mustache twirling villains, and I don't even want Doom himself to be a straightforward villain. I want him and his followers to be doing what they view as necessary, even if it's cruel, to save the multiverse, not villains for villainy's sake.

I said a long time ago that the way they revealed Robert Downey Jr. as Doom at Comic-Con felt like foreshadowing for how the film ends, with Doom surrounded by his masked followers removing his mask to reveal his face, and the others removing theirs too. That could be a real gut punch for Steve, Thor, and the other heroes as they see old friends revealed as the very enemies they've been fighting. Doom's face reveal won't shock us since we already know he looks like their dead friend Tony Stark, but for the heroes it will be the biggest shock, leading them to conclude that Doom is either a Stark variant or, more likely, that Tony Stark was a variant of Victor von Doom all along.

Who do you think is hiding under Doctor Doom's masks?