Avengers: Doomsday Theory: Doctor Doom's 'Stolen Lives' Line Could Be Aimed at Six Marvel Heroes

Doctor Doom apparently tells a group of heroes to give him back their "stolen lives," and I want to work out exactly what he means by that and why he is saying it to these particular characters. So let's build the case for how each of these people is walking around with a life that, technically, they were never supposed to have.

Scott Lang's 'Stolen Life' Began With a Rat in Endgame

Scott kind of has a stolen life. He was supposed to have stayed in the quantum realm after the post credit scene in Ant-Man and the Wasp.

If it wasn't for that pesky rat in Endgame, he never would have gotten out, he never would have reunited with Cassie, and he never would have reconnected with the Avengers to tell them that time travel was possible via the quantum realm. That single accident set up everything in Endgame and all the consequences the characters are facing now.

Steve Rogers Never Should Have Gotten His Peggy Carter Ending

Steve's stolen life is the obvious one. He was never meant to stay in the past and build this nice life with Peggy and the baby I assume is named James.

Thor's 'Stolen Life' Might Just Be a Joke About Love and Thunder

Thor's stolen life is trickier. Maybe Doom said, "You should have stayed fat." I do wonder if the ending of Thor: Love and Thunder in that well at the center of the universe is something Doom is really irritated about, or maybe Doom just hates the visual effects in that movie.

Worth remembering here that Love is not actually Thor's daughter. It's really Gorr's daughter, reincarnated via Eternity into the cosmic entity of Love.

Loki Escaped Death Thanks to the Avengers' Time Heist

I think this one is obvious too. Loki was supposed to die at the hands of Thanos in Infinity War. Instead, the actions of the time heist by the Avengers allowed Loki to escape as variant L1130 and live out this alternate destiny that is clearly going to matter to Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday.

Shuri Becoming Black Panther Could Be Doom's Cruelest Insult

Shuri's stolen life is the one I'm less sure about. I don't know, maybe it's just a deeper meta insult from Doom that she's only Black Panther because her brother died. If that's what he means by it, that would be a genuinely mean thing to say to her.

Cyclops Cheated Death Twice, and a New Actor Is Waiting

This argument applies here too. Scott Summers was supposed to be dead as of the events of X-Men: The Last Stand at the hands of Phoenix, but Wolverine's tinkering with the timeline in Days of Future Past altered history so that Cyclops was alive once more.

I do wonder if the enthusiasm for the return of James Marsden's Cyclops might get dampened as more people get excited about Kit Connor's Cyclops in the upcoming X-Men film.

Is Doom Accusing the Whole Multiverse of Living on Borrowed Time?

Putting all of these characters together, I wonder if Doom is suggesting that all of their current existences are just furthering the messy outgrowth of a multiverse that led to all of these problems in the first place.

Peggy Carter actress Hayley Atwell has repeatedly brought up the idea of existentialism when talking about her role and the roles of others in this story. As she put it, "All I will say is that it is it's sort of an existential crisis of a movie where the whole world has turned on its head and we don't even know who we are anymore."