Thunderbolts, Fantastic Four: do both lead to Doom's Void?

The trailers for Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four: First Steps both showed a version of New York being engulfed in apocalyptic shadow. My theory is that both cities could be headed for the Void, where Doctor Doom might be waiting to claim the scraps ahead of Avengers: Doomsday.

At the time, Avengers: Doomsday was due to begin production at the end of March. The Thunderbolts trailers had raised a question of their own: where are the Avengers? The best known Avengers in the MCU are mostly dead, retired, missing or anonymous through magic. I believe the ones who should still be on call might be busy fighting the villain on the other side of these shadows.

The Thunderbolts shadow attack on New York is unlike anything the MCU has shown civilians

The latest Thunderbolts trailer teased the dark form of the Sentry attacking New York City. He strikes fleeing people into shadows on the ground, and those shadows keep spreading outward. We assume they become the one large citywide shadow that swallows all of Manhattan into an inky abyss. I think this is perhaps the most frightening thing to happen to an average person in the MCU in quite some time.

Compare it to the dusting from Thanos's snap. It was haunting to see Peter Parker's face disintegrate into ash. But we knew Spider-Man would come back, and no visible trace of him or any of the dusted remained afterward. In my opinion, that kept it from being too traumatic. We never saw a pile of dust collecting on the floor, or Tony Stark washing dust from under his fingernails. That would have been horrifying.

The Thunderbolts attack, in just a couple of seconds, spares us none of that. The victim's shadow stays violently stricken upon the street, like the shadows left by victims of atomic blasts. It is the speed of it, too. In an instant, people go from running in a panic to being sucked into the ground in front of them. What makes it so striking is that these are innocent civilians running away, not superheroes or warriors fighting the threat.

In Avengers: Infinity War, the dusting was mostly limited to Avengers and warriors on the battlefield. There were New Yorkers in the background of the post credits scene, but the focus was on Nick Fury, Maria Hill and their crashing helicopter. Clint Barton's family vanished in the opening of Endgame, but we didn't see them dematerialize in the frame. There were panicked everyday people in the Battle of New York, in Johannesburg and Sokovia in Age of Ultron, in Lagos in Civil War, and in New York during Infinity War and Multiverse of Madness. Yet we never saw people die in any horrifying way. Almost everyone who has died on screen in the MCU is a warrior who faced that death head on. The MCU has been sanitized when it comes to bad things happening to innocent people. That's why I'm obsessed with this, and I think the trailer led with this image to invite us to think about what the Void is.

What the Void is in the Sentry's Marvel Comics history

In the comics, the Void is a malevolent entity, an unspecified cosmic force that bonds with Bob Reynolds when he receives the overpowered super soldier serum that makes him the Sentry. The Void's backstory is explored in Brian Michael Bendis's Dark Avengers storyline from 2009 to 2010. That's why it's coming up here, since Thunderbolts seems to be a possible take on Dark Avengers, with most of the original Thunderbolts lineup.

The comics imply the Void could date back to the Old Testament as the angel of death who plagued Egypt, when Moses told the Hebrews to mark their doorposts with lamb's blood to protect their firstborn. When Bob Reynolds realizes the Void is the dark side of his own powers, he works with Reed Richards and Doctor Strange to make everyone on Earth, themselves included, forget the Sentry ever existed. When that happens, the Void vanishes.

We don't know the source of the Void's power. But it can kill people, resurrect people and tear rifts in reality to travel across dimensions, and it doesn't need a host body to do any of that. It can scale up its power by taking over the Sentry's body. So what the Thunderbolts trailer showed is that process: the Void taking over the Sentry, becoming Dark Sentry and attacking New Yorkers. The power is called molecular kinesis, a type of matter and energy manipulation in which victims are trapped within an inescapable shroud of black matter.

The TVA's Void and Alioth in Loki and Deadpool and Wolverine

It does seem a bit of a coincidence that this entity shares its name with the multiversal dumping ground of the TVA, introduced in Loki and featured in Deadpool and Wolverine. That Void is a place, while the Void in Thunderbolts is an entity. But it's possible Marvel Studios might try to connect them to bridge Thunderbolts with Avengers: Doomsday.

The Void as a setting was an original MCU creation, so there's only so much we know about it. We do know it's patrolled by a beast called Alioth. In the comics, Alioth is a trans temporal entity, the first being to break free from the constraints of time, with an empire larger than Kang's. In the MCU, Alioth is a simpler beast, created by the tears in reality during the first multiversal war among the Kang variants. In Loki, other Loki variants described the Void as a shark tank and Alioth as the shark, a living tempest that consumes matter and energy.

So the MCU's Alioth formed from the residual energy and scar tissue left when one universe collides with another. It became a purple smoke monster that consumes pruned people and places dumped there from the multiverse, and it's how He Who Remains ended the first multiversal war. The Void is an overflow lot where leftover chunks of erased universes go, but Marvel Studios seems to like to go back there more and more. In Deadpool and Wolverine, Chris Evans's Johnny Storm said, "you're in the void think of it as Purgatory," adding that Reed called it "a metaphysical junkyard."

That tells us this version of Reed Richards, presumably the one played by Ioan Gruffudd, was aware of the Void. I don't think it's too crazy to assume other Reeds across the multiverse might have reached the same conclusion, including the one played by Pedro Pascal.

Why I think the Thunderbolts victims could end up in the Void

Here's the connection. If molecular kinesis is also tearing reality, which we know the entity form of the Void can do, and exporting these fleeing victims from the 616 universe, they might not be dead. They might instead be transported to the Void. I think everything is going to end up in the Void as we head to Doomsday.

That's what Cassandra Nova wanted in Deadpool and Wolverine when she took over Mr. Paradox's Time Ripper device. She planned to use it to destroy this universe and the next, and the next. Charles Xavier's twin failed, but I believe the person who will succeed was signaled by the biggest Easter egg in that film: Doom in his God Emperor form, seen on the cover of Secret Wars #5.

Why the Avengers might be missing from Thunderbolts

So why are the Avengers unavailable in Thunderbolts? Maybe Doctor Strange, Hulk, Captain Marvel, Spider-Man, Rhodey and Ant-Man could already be fighting Doctor Doom while this Void process is underway in New York in the 616 universe. That would explain why the people who should be on call to avenge are not there.

Fantastic Four: First Steps, Galactus and a possible Franklin Richards

The Fantastic Four: First Steps trailer also showed an apocalyptic shadow spreading over another New York in an alternate universe, coming from Galactus. I think that retro futurist city is also going to have its broken skyscrapers, monorails and infrastructure end up in the Void. That would make Doctor Doom's Battleworld kingdom all the richer.

You might object that Galactus can't transfer people and places to other realities. He's a devourer of worlds, and you'd be right. But other characters in that film might be able to. From the clues on his chalkboard, Reed Richards is rapidly researching ways to open a portal to another universe. His experiments could backfire and create an incursion that removes the whole city from Galactus's grasp but moves it to the Void.

If it isn't Reed, there's a strong indication that his and Susan's son Franklin Richards, a reality warper, will appear. I spotted a wobbly step from Vanessa Kirby in the trailer that made it look like a baby bump might have been scrubbed out with visual effects. Some have said that in the shot of her opening the door to Johnny sitting upside down, she could be wearing a baggy shirt covering a bump. In that same shot, a spherical piece of furniture with a bubble dome looks like a special baby bassinet. When Kirby was asked about the theory on Good Morning America, she gave a telling answer, saying we'd have to wait and see.

I won't name names, but we were told by a source claiming to work on the film that we were at least theorizing in the right direction on this one. Take that with a grain of salt. We could end up with baby Franklin going into full Jack Jack chaos mode in the final minutes and teleporting the whole city away, like the island at the end of Lost season 4. That Manhattan could end up in the Void.

Incursions, No Way Home and the sickness in the 616 universe

Here's what I think Marvel Studios is doing. Instead of Doctor Strange warping society's memories to erase the Sentry, we're already in a scenario like that with Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Wong said at the start of that film that the spell threatened the borders of known and unknown realities, and the way Sony has built on that event, it's clearly an incursion. It might have been the latest incursion in the 616 universe, but I don't think it was the first.

I think in Avengers: Doomsday we're going to learn that the Avengers also broke the 616 universe through their actions in Endgame. They went back in time to steal the Infinity Stones and reverse the Blip, and maybe they weren't supposed to. Tony Stark did seem to indicate they might have done something wrong, and I've thought he wasn't only referring to Thanos when he said you mess with time and it tends to mess back.

In Loki's first episode, Ravonna Renslayer said, "what they did was supposed to happen you escaping was not." That could still be true from the point of view of He Who Remains, who was scripting everything the TVA said. Maybe it was supposed to happen because He Who Remains knew what this chaotic madness would lead to and planned to benefit from it. Somewhere in these events, perhaps we'll learn the anchor being of the 616 universe died. Maybe it was Tony Stark, but I've also theorized it could be Nathaniel Richards, Victor Timely, Kang or He Who Remains. That could be a smart way to maintain what Jonathan Majors did for the role without erasing Kang entirely.

These incursions and the death of the anchor being left the 616 universe with a sickness in a death spiral, and I think that sickness is the shadowy Void we see in Thunderbolts. The shadow swallowing New York might be the same kind of sickness we saw in the post incursion universe in Multiverse of Madness, where buildings melted into inky black tendrils. I think the Void in the 616 universe has found a vessel in the Sentry to expedite the sickness. Its goal is to pull the plug on the 616 universe and digest it down to the Void, where Doom will be waiting to complete Cassandra Nova's vision, ruling a Battleworld kingdom and making Marvel heroes and villains fight for who has the right to live on in a united prime Marvel universe. That, I believe, is how it all connects.