Doctor Doom's Comic-Con Trophy Room Reveals Heroes and Villains He Has Already Beaten

At this past weekend's New York City Comic-Con, Marvel unveiled that Dr. Doom has a trophy room, and what's in it reveals that he has already fought a ton of different heroes from different teams across the multiverse, collecting trophies along the way. Among the items on display are the Ultimate Nullifier, the Tesseract, a Cyclops visor, a broken Silver Surfer board, the Venom symbiote, a piece of Thor's hammer, an Ultron head and a broken Thanos helmet.

The way I see it, this establishes Doom's dominance over previous multiverse iterations of the Avengers, the X-Men and the like that he has already met. Further down, I'll get into what the Venom symbiote could mean for Spider-Man in Avengers: Secret Wars.

A Doom trophy room echoes an old Superior Iron Man leak

Some of you may remember one of the craziest plot leaks I've ever covered, back during the Multiverse Saga for Multiverse of Madness, when 4chan was a thing. Something leaked anonymously claiming that we would see a Superior Iron Man variant across the multiverse.

According to that leak, when we were at his headquarters, or in one of his labs at his Stark Tower, we would see something along the lines of Thanos's head in a jar, as well as a bunch of other trophies from heroes and villains that Superior Iron Man had already killed. That obviously did not come to fruition. But it seems like all these years later, we may see a very similar scene, only this time it's built around Dr. Doom instead of Superior Iron Man.

The trophy room theory started with Doom's armor

This all goes back to our very first look at Dr. Doom, when we pointed out certain ornamentation on his costume. The mixed elements made it feel like he was collecting along the way to compile this armor. There was what looked like the Ten Rings on his biceps, and different emblems revealing what looked like Thor's hammer and or Captain Marvel's star. Even his breastplate looked like it was samurai inspired.

That was the original theory going around when we first saw his image at an expo over a year and a half ago. Then came industry insider rumors of a trophy room adjacent to his armor room in his castle, where we would see the artifacts he had collected along the way. One of them was said to be the Word of God, which has now been confirmed to be a book, something along the lines of the Darkhold but the opposite, that gives Doom his supreme power.

Now, with the trophy room revealed at New York City Comic-Con, we got to see exactly which trophies he already has. What's more, they actually line up with what we know about Doom.

The Ultimate Nullifier and the Tesseract may explain Doom's multiverse tricks

One of the first items on display is the Ultimate Nullifier. People have pointed out that Doom has some sort of device already revealed in the trailer, and the Ultimate Nullifier was one of those theories. It's something that would allow him to erase whole timelines if need be, and that may be what he's actually using already to help him collapse the multiverse.

The next thing on display is the Tesseract. This is important because Doom has a time platform, a transportation mode, which we've already seen in the MCU. The designers of John Krasinski's intro during the Illuminati scene in Multiverse of Madness said it was inspired by the Doom time platform. It could be that having the Tesseract has allowed him to engineer his method of hopping around his own timeline and across the multiverse.

A Cyclops visor suggests Doom has already beaten the X-Men

We then see a Cyclops visor, meaning that Doom has already fought the X-Men, or at least some iteration of Cyclops, before. I think the really big takeaway there is that he's fought different X-Men before. He's already beaten them. He's had practice. He knows the strategy.

That really goes into weaving a believable story that even with the X-Men, the Avengers and the Fantastic Four coming together, with heroes as powerful as Sentry and Thor, they're not going to be able to stop Dr. Doom.

The broken Silver Surfer board probably points to Galactus

The next trophy on display is a broken Silver Surfer board. At the very least, that means he's beaten an iteration of the Silver Surfer. What it probably means is that he's also defeated Galactus.

We saw how hard Galactus was for the Fantastic Four to deal with, and they didn't even really beat him. They just transported him away.

Doom's Venom symbiote could end up with Peter Parker in Secret Wars

The next one is super interesting: it reveals the Venom symbiote. I think, given what was revealed in the encore post credit scene where Dr. Doom collected Hulk, we know now that he also collected Peter Parker at the end of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Because of that, his collecting of these specific heroes may mean they're going to serve as his barons in Battleworld.

We've also pointed out before, and I'm sticking to this, that establishing Peter Parker's resistance to mind control may play a really fascinating key role in Battleworld. Dr. Doom knows he can wipe everybody else's memory and make 99% of Battleworld's occupants think it's the only reality that's ever been. That might not work with Peter Parker. In order to get Peter to serve as one of his barons in Battleworld, as I'm just assuming, Doom may have done it by presenting himself as Peter's old mentor, Tony Stark. That would mean taking Tony Stark's identity was one of the key things he needed to get Peter Parker on his side, and there may be more to that story, which is a topic for another day.

Still, Doom obtaining the Venom symbiote means he may also bestow it onto Peter Parker during Avengers: Secret Wars, and that would be the origin of how Peter inherits a symbiote. That would call back to the 1984 representation of the black suit Spider-Man and the origin story for how he got it in the first place. If you know how that story ends, it's Mr. Fantastic who ends up blasting it off of him. But I certainly hope they save that for a future Spider-Man movie and don't move all the way through the Venom symbiote arc for Peter Parker in one film alone.

An Ultron head may be where the Doombots came from

There's also a broken piece of Thor's hammer, and then we see an Ultron head. This is important because Doom has bots the same way that Ultron had bots. In fact, we assumed that some of those Illuminati Ultron bots might be Doombots when we were watching the first trailers.

He may have developed his own Doombots off of what he already encountered with Ultron.

A broken Thanos helmet means Doom has already beaten Thanos

Next to that is a broken Thanos helmet, meaning that indeed Doom has already killed Thanos, much like he did in the comics, and probably pulled a Sub Zero and ripped his head and spine out. I was hoping we would see something like that during Avengers: Secret Wars, as an homage to that scene. "I don't even care if they make it a different character, but who knows if Disney's willing to show something like that."

In order to retain the PG-13 rating they need for this to reach all audiences, there is a limit to what they can show, including only one curse word and no blood, which they get around by making it alien blood in different colors. They did that in Infinity War, and they'll probably do it again somewhat in these films. I assume there's going to be a level of violence we haven't seen before to match the tone we've already seen in the trailers. "But at the end of the day, this isn't John Wick," and Doom ripping out someone's head and spine, no matter how they did it, would be a tricky thing to do.

That being said, it was shown as imagery during the laser show last year, which was all imagery and iconography from the actual Doom in this film, with the runes and such. Maybe it's in the cards. Either way, he's already fought at least one iteration of Thanos across the multiverse and beaten him, and it's also safe to assume he may have beaten several iterations already.

Doom's practice against these foes could leave the Avengers outmatched

That makes for a very interesting dynamic against our Avengers, our X-Men and our Fantastic Four, who have never encountered Doom before. How much of a chance do they actually stand if he's had practice fighting all of them and beat villains that put them all to the test?

Ultron wasn't an easy outing. It took an entire Avengers team. And we know what it took to beat Thanos in our universe and on other universes: they needed a Strange with the Darkhold, Professor X, Black Bolt and the like in order to beat him there when he had an Infinity Stone.

So I think it's a safe assumption that Marvel will show us some sort of glimpse into his trophy room, as all the rumors suggest, and that those scenes will do exactly what this trophy room at New York City Comic-Con did, serving as massive reference points for just how powerful Doom is and who he's already beaten. Based on what we know about the MCU, we can sort of already know where he's at, and it'll explain why he's so much more powerful than all these other heroes he's going against, even when they group together.

How excited are you for Avengers: Doomsday?