The Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory of the week isn’t about a trailer, a casting leak, or Robert Downey Jr. posting another cryptic Instagram photo of himself looking moody in a metal mask (though, don’t worry, he’s still doing that too). It’s about two glitches. One glitch belongs to Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner. The other belongs to a homemade superhero-tracking app built by a guy who still calls himself “the guy in the chair.” And thanks to eagle-eyed fans stitching them together, Marvel may have accidentally — or, more likely, very much on purpose — confirmed that Doctor Doom isn’t just collecting the Hulk. He may already have Spider-Man.
Grab your webs, your gamma radiation, and your finest tinfoil hat. Let’s get into it.
Wait, Doom Is “Collecting” People Now? Since When?
Since roughly this week, actually. When Marvel Studios re-released Avengers: Endgame in theaters as Avengers: Endgame Encore on September 25, it didn’t just slap on a new title card and call it a day. The re-release quietly bolted on about four minutes of brand-new footage — shot during Avengers: Doomsday production — featuring Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, and Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, according to Variety. This is the first mandatory reading assignment of any respectable Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory, so pay attention.
In the new credits sequence, Bruce is holed up in an underground bunker, tinkering with a serum meant to suppress his inner rage-monster. Things are going fine, all things considered, until Doctor Doom breaks into the facility and Bruce transforms into the Hulk to face him — with the scene cutting away before we see what happens next. Screen Rant reports that the camera crashes to the ground afterward, revealing the leftover green magical scorch marks from whatever spell Doom used to yank Hulk out of there. Before that, Doom announces his intentions with maximum comic-book menace, essentially telling Banner he’s not there to chat — he’s there to collect him.
Collect. Not fight. Not recruit. Collect — like Bruce Banner is a rare Pokémon card Doom’s been missing from his binder.
And this is where the Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory train really leaves the station, because as ComicBook.com points out, this wasn’t just a cool character beat. It was a technical moment — the lights and tech in Banner’s bunker start glitching before Doom shows up in a flash of green light and delivers his now-infamous “collect you” line. Glitching tech, right before an abduction. Keep that detail warm. We’re going to need it in about two paragraphs.
Meanwhile, In Queens: Ned’s App Has Some Questions
Rewind a couple months to Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the Tom Holland sequel that had Peter Parker living a quiet, anonymous, MJ-doesn’t-remember-me kind of life after the spell at the end of No Way Home. The movie ends its story more or less on an emotional high note. Then the credits roll, and Marvel drops one of the most quietly unsettling post-credits scenes in MCU history — and, per most Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory chatter online, one of the most important.
The scene centers on the “Spidey Tracker,” an app Ned built to monitor Spider-Man sightings around New York, because of course he did. According to NME, the app initially shows Spider-Man in his usual NYC haunts, then glitches, the map rapidly zooms out from Earth entirely, and the tracker relocates him to some random coordinate in outer space, before a title card simply reads “Spider-Man will return.” No dialogue. No cameo. No villain reveal. Just a phone freaking out and a location pin drifting off into the void like it’s late for a Zoom call.
At the time, this scene mostly generated confused shrugs and a thousand YouTube explainer videos. Kotaku noted that the app essentially says Spider-Man has gone off-world for reasons unknown, with no characters appearing on screen to clarify anything. Fans speculated everything from the Fantastic Four’s spaceship crashing into the MCU (a real theory floated by Looper) to Peter quietly hanging out in the Quantum Realm, as BamSmackPow suggested.
But nobody clocked the glitch itself as the clue. Until now.
Also Read: Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory: How Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk Could Become Doctor Doom’s Maestro
The Detail That Ties the Whole Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory Together
Here’s the moment that took this from “fun coincidence” to “certified Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory with receipts.” Once Endgame Encore’s new Banner-abduction scene hit theaters and leaked online, sharp-eyed fans noticed the tech glitch that precedes Doom’s arrival in Banner’s bunker looks and behaves almost identically to the glitch that overtakes Ned’s Spidey Tracker in Brand New Day.
ComicBook.com laid it out plainly: the same type of glitch seen when Doom “collects” Banner shows up in the Brand New Day post-credits scene, where the Spidey Tracker suddenly places Spider-Man in space. Their conclusion, and the one now fueling this entire corner of Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory discourse, is straightforward: it’s possible the Spidey Tracker glitches the exact same way Banner’s bunker tech did because Doctor Doom has abducted Peter Parker too.
Sit with that for a second. Marvel didn’t just tease “Spider-Man will return.” It may have shown us, in real time, the exact mechanism by which he disappeared — using the same visual and audio glitch signature as a scene released months later that confirms what that glitch actually is: the calling card of a multiverse-hopping warlord who signs his kidnappings with green light and a British-by-way-of-Latveria accent.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s a threading needle. That’s Kevin Feige playing four-dimensional continuity chess while the rest of us were still trying to figure out why Ned needed an app for this in the first place.
Why Would Doom Want Spider-Man Anyway?
This is where the comics come in, and where every reasonable Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory eventually has to land: Secret Wars. Multiple outlets, including ComicBook.com and Kotaku, point to Jonathan Hickman’s 2015 comic run as the MCU’s likely blueprint. In that story, the multiverse is collapsing through a wave of incursions, and rather than let every reality die, Doctor Doom steals cosmic power from the Beyonders and stitches the surviving fragments of countless Earths into a single patchwork world called Battleworld. In Battleworld, Doom doesn’t just rule — he curates. Heroes and villains from every universe get folded into his new domain, whether they RSVP’d or not.
If Marvel is building toward some live-action flavor of that story — and the pieces increasingly suggest it is — then “collecting” isn’t villain flavor text. It’s the actual plan. BGR frames the Endgame Encore reveal as proof that Doom isn’t just powerful enough to kidnap the Hulk — he may have been scouring the multiverse specifically hunting down those connected to his own tragic backstory. Peter Parker, a walking, web-slinging, multiverse-adjacent liability who has personally met at least two other versions of himself on screen, is about as tempting a Battleworld acquisition target as Marvel could possibly cast.
Add in the Looper theory that Doom’s incursions — the comic-canon event where colliding universes destroy each other unless one blinks first — are already loose in this universe, and suddenly Ned’s glitchy app isn’t just quirky comic relief. It’s a live readout of a multiversal abduction in progress.
But Let’s Not Get Ahead of Ourselves (An Obligatory Skepticism Break)
Every good Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory needs a moment of “okay, but actually, hold on.” So here it is: none of this is officially confirmed by Marvel Studios. The Brand New Day glitch never shows Doom’s face, name, or so much as a stray metal glove. Director Destin Daniel Cretton has said, per BamSmackPow, that he deliberately landed on an “ambiguous” ending after considering other options — which is filmmaker-speak for “we know exactly what this means and we are not telling you yet.”
There’s also a competing read floated by Looper: that the glitching tracker could be a deliberate misdirect, with the “real” Earth-616 Peter Parker safe at home in Queens while a different universe’s Spider-Man is the one who actually gets yanked into the incursion crossfire. Multiverse storytelling giveth, and multiverse storytelling immediately taketh away your ability to be sure of literally anything.
So: is Doom collecting Tom Holland’s Peter Parker the same way he’s collecting Ruffalo’s Hulk? The circumstantial case — matching glitch effects, matching green-light theatrics, matching “off you go to Battleworld” energy — is genuinely strong. But it remains, appropriately, theory. Which, again, is very much the whole point of an Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory: it’s the fun, slightly unhinged connective tissue Marvel leaves lying around for us to find, months before they’ll ever confirm it on the record.
The Verdict (For Now)
Here’s where the Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory currently stands, gavel not yet fully banged:
- The Hulk is confirmed-ish for Doomsday. Endgame Encore all but confirms Hulk’s presence in the film, and outlets across the board agree Banner’s abduction is real, on-screen, and intentional.
- The glitch is the smoking gun. The tech-glitch signature preceding Doom’s “collection” of Banner matches the one in the Brand New Day Spidey Tracker scene closely enough that multiple outlets, not just overheated forum posters, are drawing the line themselves.
- The Secret Wars endgame (pun very much intended) fits. A Doom who’s actively assembling heroes from across the multiverse for a Battleworld-style event explains both scenes with one tidy, if terrifying, bow.
- Nobody has said the words “Peter Parker” and “Doctor Doom” in the same confirmed sentence yet. Which, frankly, is exactly what a guy assembling a secret patchwork planet of stolen superheroes would want.
Avengers: Doomsday arrives December 18, and if this Avengers: Doomsday Plot Theory holds up, Peter Parker’s “vacation” might be less “finding himself” and more “finding himself on a planet made of other planets, standing next to a increasingly smug variant of Tony Stark.” Either way, Ned’s app owes him an apology — and possibly a firmware update that can handle interdimensional kidnapping notifications.
Sources referenced: Variety • Screen Rant • ComicBook.com • BGR • NME • Kotaku • Looper • BamSmackPow • GamesRadar+ • MovieWeb
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