In June of 2017, we reported that Fargo and Legion creator Noah Hawley was developing a movie based on iconic Fantastic Four villain Doctor Doom. That was literally all we knew at the time, and we haven’t heard anything since, but apparently this wasn’t one of those phony Hollywood projects that people sign on to just so they can impress their friends at parties. According to Deadline, Hawley says he has handed a script in to Fox, which owns the rights to all of the Fantastic Four-related characters, which means this is definitely a real thing that Hawley does intend to make. Unfortunately, it soon won’t be up to him or Fox, now that Disney—and, by extension, Marvel Studios—is on the verge of swallowing the Fantastic Four rights into its hungry maw.
Hawley says he “would love to make” his Doctor Doom movie, but he knows that Marvel has a “25,000-year plan” already, and he doesn’t know if there’s room in it for him or his movie. He even says he recently met with Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige, who asked “if he was still working on Doctor Doom,” but Hawley says Feige hasn’t responded to his offer to let him read the completed script. That doesn’t seem like a great sign, since Kevin Feige should be more interested than anyone in seeing what kind of ideas people have for superhero movies.
As for what Hawley’s Doctor Doom would be about, he told Deadline that it would all be set in his home country of Latveria and that it would be a “kind of Cold War, geopolitical movie.” Rather than fighting the Fantastic Four or mucking things up with his Time Platform in the movie, Doctor Doom would be trying to raise his nation’s status in the world by inviting a female journalist to interview him about all of the great stuff that Doom does for his people. That, presumably, wouldn’t work out too well when the journalist inevitably discovered that Doom is actually a maniac who runs Latveria with a literal iron fist, but it’s certainly a fun premise. Too bad we’ll probably never see it.