Did Doctor Strange See Doctor Doom? The Time Loop Theory That Recasts Infinity War Ahead of Avengers: Doomsday

We seriously need to consider that Doctor Strange may have seen the future of Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, and that the one outcome where the heroes win may have been the end of Secret Wars rather than the end of Avengers: Endgame. The most recent update from trusted industry insider Alex Perez, which I am working from here in June 2025, recontextualizes key moments throughout the Infinity Saga, including the moment in Infinity War when Strange looked forward and revealed he had seen 14,000,605 futures.

At the time of writing, both Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars were still ahead. As Perez tells it, Marvel Studios had a plan from early on in the Multiverse Saga for how it would treat everything going on in the MCU, and that plan was the impetus for Secret Wars. With the saga approaching the end of that plan, I think it is worth going back through the canon to see how it fits.

Alex Perez indicated the Multiverse Saga plan was always a time loop

The update comes from Alex Perez over at The Cosmic Circus. He indicated that Marvel Studios may have changed its villain from Kang to Doom, but that the plan for the Multiverse Saga has always been the same: the Infinity Saga and the Multiverse Saga were the 14,000,605th try of a time loop that had been running over and over again.

Perez also indicated that He Who Remains was not lying. No matter what happens, and no matter what different actions the Avengers take to try to intercede, it always ends the same way: a multiversal war, He Who Remains, the Sacred Timeline and the TVA. That is where things get interesting, because it sends me straight back to one scene in Infinity War.

Doctor Strange saw a finite number of outcomes in Infinity War

Look at Doctor Strange's exact words in that scene. He says he looked forward in time to view alternate futures, to see all, not some, of the possible outcomes of the coming conflict. He never qualifies that by saying he did not finish. When Star-Lord asks how many he saw, he simply states the number: 14,000,605.

That is "A finite number, not an infinite number of possible outcomes." And not only is it finite, but in 14,000,604 of those outcomes they lose. So what is Doctor Strange really referring to? If the MCU is a loop that has repeated a set number of times, a finite count of futures starts to make a lot more sense than it did in 2018.

Earth-838 shows the heroes could beat Thanos, so the losses mean something else

In Multiverse of Madness we see, on Earth-838, a different combination of heroes who were able to take out Thanos on Titan. Granted, that team may have been a little more powerful, with Professor X and Black Bolt on it. Still, I don't believe that all of those 14,000,604 combinations failed to have the Avengers win against Thanos in some kind of way.

Instead, I think the outcomes Strange saw were ones where, no matter what they did, they would always end up right back here fighting Thanos again and living through this timeline, because it was an infinite loop. The one he refers to where they actually win is the one where they finally break the loop. In other words, his single victory may have been pointing all the way to the end of Secret Wars.

Endgame's time heist still matters because it created Loki, God of Stories

That does not mean the events of Avengers: Endgame are meaningless. There are two specific events in Endgame that might mean even more under this theory. The first is the Avengers travelling back in time to try to get the Infinity Stones. If they don't do that, presumably the Loki in the lobby of Avengers Tower who grabs the Tesseract never goes on to become Loki, God of Stories, where he is now.

Ultimately, it is because of him that the Temporal Loom has been broken. There is no circular Sacred Timeline anymore, and Loki is holding together an infinitely branched world tree, allowing it to grow. In the end, that won't be enough, and that is the whole conflict of Avengers: Secret Wars. But the time heist is what set all of it in motion.

Tony Stark's snap may matter because of his connection to Doctor Doom

The second huge moment in Endgame that still needs to mean something is Tony Stark snapping. That is the moment Doctor Strange holds up as the only way for them to win. But maybe it didn't mean that specifically because Tony snaps and beats Thanos there.

Maybe it is because of what the Russos have said about Tony's death being tied to why Doctor Doom looks like our Tony Stark. There is a reason there. They are tied together, and the Russos have admitted that. No matter how they are connected, if they are tied together, it means Tony Stark had to die. "Maybe him dying was more important to lead to these moments than even defeating Thanos."

What's even crazier at the bottom of this theory is that Doctor Doom may be what Doctor Strange saw in the future. His belief that he needed to preserve Tony Stark's life may have come from seeing a Doctor Doom who looked exactly like Tony. In the moment, and under immense stress, Strange may have seen a face that looked like Tony's and still thought, he's the key to us winning.

Strange's admission in Multiverse of Madness doesn't break the theory

As I worked on this theory, I had to reconcile one problem. After Endgame, in Multiverse of Madness, Doctor Strange admits, sitting at the table with Wong and America Chavez, that they don't know much about the multiverse and that it is still a rather unknown thing to him.

That knowledge wouldn't have been necessary here, though, because he would have been seeing the 616 timeline playing over and over again, their own timeline. He wouldn't have needed knowledge of everything across the multiverse to follow a circle on his own timeline. It is the same way Tony Stark's time travel was not multiversal; it just went up and down the 616 timeline.

Endgame broke its own time travel rules, which makes Secret Wars tricky

It has been years since I have talked about Infinity War and Endgame in any meaningful theory way, and I should say that even back then I was pretty vocal, and a little upset, about how Endgame handled time travel. The film set up one set of rules for how time travel works, but then said you could go back and replace the Infinity Stones in the exact place you took them. By the rules they set, that doesn't undo the future it would have created. So they set their own rules and then broke them. The fact that they weren't on the same page about what actually happened with Steve Rogers was also a little disconcerting.

But if you want to poke plot holes in things, you can. Overall, I think the Russos did an excellent job of not overexplaining things they could have got bogged down in. Tony creating time travel could have been a 15 minute scene; instead it was a couple of minutes. The same goes for the Stark gauntlet. How did he make it? He's Tony Stark. That is a great way to avoid plot holes where they aren't needed.

Still, they couldn't keep the time travel rules together within the same movie, so I think it will be a little tricky to get on the same page with Loki season 1, Loki season 2 and how the multiverse has been treated up until now. You have to imagine Michael Waldron, the original writer on the first script for Secret Wars, has at least been consulted, since he wrote Multiverse of Madness and came up with some of the main multiversal rules. Marvel also still has the two writers from Loki to consult.

Breaking the loop would make Secret Wars a soft reboot

If Marvel Studios truly had the plan Perez described, where no matter who the villain is, the whole thing has been repeating over and over for 14,000,605 tries, then Avengers: Secret Wars is going to mean something. Once that conflict is resolved and the multiverse is reshaped, the MCU would be in completely brand new, uncharted territory: a soft reboot for a continuity that has never been able to grow and change. In a meta sense, that is what would make Secret Wars mean even more.

We have basically entered full theory season, and not everyone is going to agree with every theory. There will be ways to argue and debunk them. I try to stick to what is in the canon, what has been put on screen and specifically the dialogue chosen, rather than referencing comics or chaining together two or three degrees of separation in my logic. Maybe sometimes I'm not right, and that's totally fine. "They're just theories."

Do you think Doctor Strange's one winning future was really the end of Secret Wars, and that the face he saw was Doctor Doom's?