Avengers Doomsday Leak: Magneto Reportedly Joins Deadpool and Wolverine to Fight Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man Villains

There's a new scoop from industry insider Daniel Richtman, also known as Daniel RPK, that recontextualizes what we know about the opening scene for Avengers: Doomsday. I'll issue the customary spoiler warning, but a lot of this information has been out there for a while and it now looks like the details are being extended further. What makes it even crazier is a quote from a specific actor, given months ago, that now appears to have actually been a major spoiler for how the movie opens.

Remember to take anything that doesn't come directly from Marvel Studios with a grain of salt. But in the case of this report, and plenty of others, a lot of this has circulated for a while, so if it would ruin your experience of the film, now is the time to step away.

Daniel RPK Says Magneto Joins Deadpool and Wolverine in the Opening Scene

According to the latest update from Daniel Richtman, the scene with Deadpool and Wolverine at the front of Avengers: Doomsday apparently also includes Magneto from their universe. As a side note, Daniel RPK has also said in the last week or so that those images of Wolverine and Spider-Man on a blue screen, with Wolverine impaled, are real, even though others have debated whether those images were made with artificial intelligence.

Earlier plot leaks that seemed credible already suggested Deadpool and Wolverine would show up in the first act and fight Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man in his own corner of the multiverse, possibly using some TVA-inspired tech in the form of a time eraser bomb meant to eliminate their timeline entirely.

Why I Was Skeptical This Scene Was Real

For the record, I've always had a problem with that version of the scene because I don't think it lines up with the characters we know and their values from Earth-10005. That's why I was skeptical of those reports, especially after other industry insiders mentioned there was a lot of what they called misinformation about the beginning of the film, which I took to mean this scene specifically.

But it now seems like my skepticism was misplaced and that this scene is real. Not only does it apparently have Deadpool and Wolverine fighting Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man, but Daniel RPK adds that Magneto will be fighting what he describes as Tobey's villains, plural.

Magneto May Be Taking On More Than One of Tobey Maguire's Villains

If one of those villains is Doctor Octopus, he is not going to be having a good time, and I think there's a chance it is him. That was one of the fringe rumors going around, that we'd see some of Tobey's villains, and Doc Ock was one of them. Now it sounds like we could be getting more than one, and you can imagine if it's Doc Ock, it might be Green Goblin as well. Either way, Magneto is going to wipe the floor with those two.

This builds the scene taking place in Tobey's line of the multiverse into a full-on opening action sequence, which is exactly how I'd want Avengers: Doomsday to start. I've said before they need to hit the ground running from the beginning of the movie, and this sounds like them deciding to cross over Tobey's universe with the Fox X-Men universe, something that's never actually happened before, right at the start of the film in a full action sequence.

Ian McKellen's Months-Old Quote About New Jersey Now Lines Up

What makes this even crazier is that we know this actually happens, because Sir Ian McKellen gave a quote months ago about pretending to destroy New Jersey, as he put it. Now, based on these leaks, it seems the New Jersey, or East Coast, he'll be destroying belongs to Tobey Maguire's timeline.

When the Russos were asked about that quote, they said McKellen must have just misspoken because that doesn't happen. I think they were obviously lying. It clearly happens at the beginning of the film, while Magneto, Deadpool and Wolverine are fighting against Tobey and his Spider-Man rogues gallery.

My Own Doubts About Whether This Fits the Characters

Taken as a whole, I think the bigger picture here suggests this is true, but part of me stays skeptical. The Charles Xavier from Earth-10005 that we've followed this whole time has died multiple times, and one of those deaths was on Earth-838. The others are true but on timelines that have since been retconned. It doesn't matter, though, because it's a variant of Charles Xavier, the same kind of variant we saw on Earth-838 when he showed belief in Doctor Strange. Charles Xavier is not going around killing trillions by annihilating other timelines to save his own. I simply don't believe this. There's even a panel in the comics where Beast goes through this same philosophical debate, and it doesn't take him more than half a page before he's disgusted he even considered it.

The one asterisk I'll throw out is that it's Magneto in this scene, not Xavier, and given what we know about both of their stances on violence and passivity, Magneto would be the one who'd be all for erasing a timeline if it meant preserving his own.

What This Confirms About the Multiverse's Scope in Doomsday

Separately from whether that specific detail is true, there's more context here for something I think we've talked about multiple times, which is just how far this movie is going to go with the multiverse, and whether there'd even be time to explore timelines beyond Earth-838, Earth-616 and Earth-10005. If they're going to Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man universe first in the opening of the film, I think that confirms we're going to see multiple timelines, which means multiple variants.

That lines up with reports that while we're on Earth-10005, we'll also get to see what the Avengers from their timeline look like, including multiple variants of characters like possibly Steve Rogers. I think this opens the door for Secret Wars to be the craziest film we've ever seen, and in the context of Doomsday, it could really get into characters and variants that make the story more interesting if they don't already have what they need with the core three universes.

The Risk and the Reward of Leaning Into Variants

You'd think the movie would already be full following our heroes, meaning the specific variants they'll want to matter in the story. Rick and Morty has gone over this idea plenty of times, exploring what it means to follow one Rick and Morty when there are infinite versions of them across the multiverse, and whether one version even matters more than another. We don't need to settle that debate, but in storytelling, audiences have already shown they'll follow one variant after another as long as the story focuses on them, and that's been proven with Loki.

The Loki we followed in the first two seasons of that show isn't the same Loki who died during Infinity War. He's a variant on a branch timeline created by the Avengers' time travel, and audiences embraced him as the Loki from the Infinity Saga because there's a continuity of character there. As long as the story focuses on one variant, we can buy into it. But bringing in other variants runs the risk of watering things down, even as it adds the excitement of seeing variants we never thought we'd get.

Kevin Feige has even admitted that Multiverse of Madness needed a little more madness, partly because of COVID protocols affecting how it was shot. I think this could really set Secret Wars up to be absolutely wild, with things like a full Thor Corps, and I can't wait for it.