Marvel Studios put three mannequins on a rotating stand at San Diego Comic-Con this summer and said almost nothing about them, and the internet has been chewing on it ever since. The costumes belonged to something the booth called the Latverian Witches, and they came out one per day like a slow reveal nobody asked for: green on the first day, orange on the second, purple by Friday. No names, no casting, no context, no press release. Now a batch of promotional images has turned up online claiming there is a fourth witch nobody has seen, and the fandom has already decided who is inside the mask.
Here is the part worth being straight about before anything else. The images doing the rounds are a leak, and every outlet running them is working from the same unattributed drop, with nobody willing to say where it came from. That is not the same thing as a Marvel announcement and we are not going to pretend it is. What the leak adds to the three costumes we already knew about is a fourth witch in brown, and a masked figure the images label “Boris” whose helmet carries a circular slot right in the middle of the forehead. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Avengers: Doomsday” and for character designs Marvel Studios has never made public.
The costumes belonged to something the booth called the Latverian Witches, and they came out one per day like a slow reveal nobody asked for: green on the first day, orange on the second, purple by Friday.”
Start with what is actually nailed down, because it is a shorter list than the discourse suggests. “Avengers: Doomsday” arrives on December 18, 2026, the Russo brothers are directing, and Robert Downey Jr. is playing Doctor Doom, a piece of casting that still reads like a dare eighteen months after it was announced. Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth are in it. D23 put banners up showing Doom’s costume with more detail than the first teases gave us. And that is roughly where the confirmed column ends. The witches have never been named in an official Marvel document, never been attached to an actor in a trade announcement, and never been described by anybody on the production. Marvel put the suits behind glass and walked away, which in this town is its own kind of statement.
The colour-coding is what set the theories off, and to be fair to the theorists, it is not a stupid read. Purple is Clea’s palette going back decades in the comics, and Charlize Theron’s version turned up in a “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” post-credits scene and then vanished into the schedule with nothing to do. Green points at Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), who is both magically equipped and personally responsible for cracking the multiverse open in the first place, which makes her exactly the sort of loose end Doom would want on a leash. Orange has been read as Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), partly because merchandise hints have Doom throwing around red chaos magic he has no business owning, and partly because the MCU left her under a mountain in a way nobody has ever called a death.
Which brings us to the brown one, and to the thing everybody is actually talking about. The slot in that forehead is the whole argument. Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) ended “Multiverse of Madness” getting a third eye punched into his skull by the Darkhold, a change the MCU has conspicuously never undone or even revisited on screen. A mask built with an aperture in precisely that spot is either a deliberate nod or a coincidence with terrible timing, and coincidence is not usually how costume departments work. The comics give the idea a spine, too: Doom’s most famous version of himself is the one who catches a dying multiverse and rebuilds it as Battleworld, and he does not manage that alone.
We are still going to hold this one at arm’s length, and here is why. The whole theory rests on a single visual detail in an image whose origin nobody can name, and the outlet that ran the pictures first flagged that convincing AI fakes are now good enough to fool a trained eye. A hole in a mask is also just a hole in a mask; Doom’s own aesthetic is full of rivets, vents and sockets, and a coven serving a Latverian sorcerer-king is going to be dressed in his design language rather than their own. The mask being called “Boris” is worth pausing on as well, because Boris in the comics is Doom’s elderly retainer, the closest thing the man has to a father figure, and that is a strange label to hang on a transformed Sorcerer Supreme.
If any version of this is real, the storytelling logic is the interesting part rather than the casting. A coven of masked women serving Doom is a tidy way to bring back four characters the MCU has left in limbo without paying for four separate reintroductions, and it solves a problem the Russos genuinely have: this film is carrying an enormous cast and cannot afford to stop and explain where everybody has been. Put them in identical armour, let the audience work it out, and the reveal does the emotional lifting for free. Other names have been floated too, including Peggy Carter, Pepper Potts and Storm, who is conspicuously missing from the X-Men side of the announcements.
The honest position, four months out from release, is that Marvel has told us the witches exist and nothing else, and everything past that is people reading tea leaves off a costume. That is not a criticism of the fandom, it is what happens when a studio puts an unexplained suit in a glass case at the biggest convention of the year. The company knows exactly what it is doing; a mystery costs nothing to maintain and buys months of free conversation. What we would watch for next is whether the marketing starts showing these four in motion, because a studio that intends a surprise keeps them out of the trailers entirely, and a studio that has already lost the secret will start leaning into it.
What Do You Think? Is the third-eye slot in that brown mask a genuine tell that Doctor Strange has been remade as one of Doom’s coven, or are we all pattern-matching on a rivet? If the witches really are Clea, Sylvie and Wanda, does hiding three returning characters under identical armour count as a clever reintroduction or a way of avoiding writing one? And after everything the multiverse has cost the MCU, do you actually want Strange working for Doom, or has that character earned a better exit than that?
See you on the next binge!
