Russo Brothers' Cryptic Avengers: Doomsday Photo May Point to Reed Richards and Doctor Doom's College Rivalry

I think we may have worked out the cryptic message behind the Russo brothers' latest Avengers: Doomsday teaser. My read is that the blurry photo shows Reed Richards' chalkboard with an equation for multiversal travel, and that Reed is rebuilding that equation from work Doctor Doom did back when the two were at college together.

The Russo brothers shared the photo yesterday, and theories spread quickly. I heard people suggest it was Reed's chalkboard, a TVA monitor, or an equation that actually predicts Doctor Doom's arrival. In my personal opinion, the answer I landed on addresses what could be the biggest problem with Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, and it points toward a huge showdown between Reed Richards and Doctor Doom.

The Russo brothers' photo appears to show Reed Richards' chalkboard

There are two parts to this photo: what it is, and what is on it. On the first question, I believe it is the chalkboard of Reed Richards that we saw in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The yellow bar along the bottom of the image is what gives it away for me, and I think it looks pretty similar to the chalkboard from that film.

Assuming that is right, the next question is what is written on it. The image is very blurry and nobody can make out exactly what it says. It does look like it could be part words and part equation.

The equation is probably for multiversal travel, and I think it came from Doom

Asking what the equation is doesn't go deep enough, because I think we probably already know the answer. It is an equation for multiversal travel, and I don't think that part is much of a mystery. The better question is where the equation comes from.

I don't think Reed came up with it himself. I think he is deriving it from something Doctor Doom already did in front of him, because I think Doom has already solved the problem. My theory is that Doom had already figured out multiversal travel and had been travelling the multiverse a lot by the time of The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Doom's empty Latveria chair and his teleporting entrance in First Steps

There are spoilers here for The Fantastic Four: First Steps and its post credit scene. I think Doom's travels explain why there was an empty chair for Latveria when Sue called all the world leaders together at the Future Foundation. Based on the ages of the Fantastic Four, Doom would be around the same age as Reed Richards, since they went to college together. I believe that shared history is a big part of the story Avengers: Doomsday will tell. It is also what I think the cryptic photo is hinting at, and I think it needs to be addressed.

If Victor wasn't at that meeting because he was travelling the multiverse and dealing with the incursion problem, that fits how he arrives in the post credit scene. He simply showed up in the Baxter Building. No door opened, he didn't knock, and he didn't come up in the elevator. He teleported into the room. If you listen closely, you can hear a kind of humming as a teleportation device opens and he appears. To me that means Doom has mastered teleportation just as Reed did.

Reed and Victor's college rivalry could be the heart of Doom's origin

This matters for Avengers: Doomsday because one of the biggest problems at the time was that there had been no real buildup for Doctor Doom. A lot of people wanted to know his backstory, and that backstory is closely tied to Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four. I was very happy to think the film would connect them, and that Doom would be from the same universe. I think Doom was working on multiversal travel at college, where he was roommates with Reed. I don't think Reed was working on the same thing. He may have been trying to figure out space travel.

Reed and Doom were super competitive at college, especially Doom. They were intellectual peers who debated esoteric theories, and that impressed everyone around them. People at the college compared them to Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci. There is a lot to Doom's backstory that I suspected the film probably wouldn't have room for, so I thought the main focus would be the relationship between Reed and Victor.

In the original story, Victor was obsessed with designing a machine that could project a being's astral form into another dimension, basically to contact his dead mother. Reed looked at his calculations and said he had made a mistake. Doom was so arrogant, and disliked Reed so much, that he ignored him and went ahead. The experiment exploded in his face and scarred it, and it ultimately led to him being kicked out of college. Doom went on to hate Reed for it.

I thought the MCU would change this a little. My guess was that Victor would be focused on multiverse travel and Reed on space travel, with Reed arguing that we have to explore our own universe before any possible multiverse. That is where they would have clashed. It is more practical to build a ship that can take you into space and keep you alive before you even try to reach another universe. That is where I imagine Victor saying something to Reed along the lines of, "You're thinking too small."

Reed may be piecing together Doom's old work to rescue Franklin

As in the comics, I think Reed and Doom showed each other their work, and that is where this equation comes from. I think Reed is remembering what Doom was doing at college, because they have to chase Doom to find their son. That is how they know Doom is no longer in their universe: he has perfected a multiversal travel formula.

So Reed is trying to recall everything Victor showed him so he can work out multiverse travel too. I wouldn't be surprised if he even has some old notes lying around. The MCU will obviously do this differently, because it never adapts the comics page for page. But for Doctor Doom to work in the MCU, I think he has to be connected to Mr. Fantastic and the Fantastic Four. "This can't just be a random variant. It needs to mean more than that."

Reed could brief the Avengers on Doom the way Thanos was explained in Infinity War

As I have argued before, this connection also lets Reed tell the other heroes, the Avengers, the X-Men and the rest, who Doctor Doom really is once they realise he is the true threat to them all. In Avengers: Infinity War, we got a lot of Thanos backstory from characters like Gamora, or the Hulk arriving at the Sanctum Sanctorum. The Russo brothers directed Infinity War and Endgame, and I thought they would do the same thing here, using Reed to fill everyone in on Doom.

Doom may see himself as the hero trying to save the multiverse with Franklin

The biggest part of this is Doom arriving to take Franklin Richards, the son of Reed and Sue, as we saw in the First Steps post credit scene. This isn't Doom randomly going after the Fantastic Four's child. He knows exactly who they are, that they have powers, and that Reed is a genius. He has seen what they have done because he lives in their universe. So when he found out Galactus wanted their son, he would probably know right away that the child has an immense power inside him.

If what we had been hearing about Doom is true, he is actually the hero of this story in his own eyes. He is trying to save the multiverse, and he needs Franklin's powers to save universes from incursions, maybe even ones already destroyed. What we heard was that he kidnapped Franklin to use him to save the multiverse and possibly undo incursions. With Doom as the main villain of such a multiversal film, that is another reason I believe he perfected multiverse travel before Reed did.

I really do think it goes back to college, which is how Reed gets an idea of how to make multiversal travel work. My theory is that this photo comes from a scene after Doom takes Franklin, with Reed trying to figure out how to get him back. The first step is learning to travel through the multiverse, and that is what I believe is on this board.

Do you think the chalkboard shows Reed rebuilding Doom's old multiversal equation, or is it something else entirely?