Robert Downey Jr. spent Halloween in a blue Fantastic Four suit, and Pedro Pascal answered by pulling a silver Doctor Doom mask over a sweatshirt and jeans. The two men are supposed to be enemies in Avengers: Doomsday this December, so for one night they simply traded places.
Downey posted the video to his own Instagram account on Saturday, October 31, with a three-word caption: “Victor. Richard. Costume swap!” By Sunday evening the reel showed 7.5 million likes, 27,000 comments and 305,000 shares, and screenshots of the pair had spread across X within hours.
What each man actually wore
Downey went all in. His costume carried the Fantastic Four’s number four emblem across the chest and a white utility belt, the uniform tied to Pascal’s Reed Richards in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. In one shot he covers his face with both hands while his masked costar stands beside him.
Pascal kept it loose. He wore the Doom mask and a green hooded cape over a dark MIT crewneck and jeans, which reads as a nod to Reed Richards the scientist peeking out from under the villain’s armor. A full Doom outfit is hard to improvise on a Saturday night; a mask and cape do the job.
The costumes did not stay indoors. Pascal shared a short clip of the pair walking the street on his Instagram story, and a fan posted photos of Downey and Pascal with two children in Star Wars costumes, one of them dressed as Pascal’s Mandalorian. Badiyaa could not view that fan post directly, so treat the trick-or-treating details as second-hand.
Earlier the same day Downey had posted a separate Halloween drawing in the style of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: a small Doctor Doom trick-or-treater holding an orange rock with the words “I got a rock…”, while a large orange hand belonging to the Thing offers candy from a doorway.
Why the swap lands
The joke works only because the casting is real. Downey, who played Tony Stark for more than a decade, now plays Victor von Doom, the villain the collapsing multiverse’s heroes unite against. Pascal leads the Fantastic Four as Reed Richards, with Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach returning alongside him. Anthony and Joe Russo direct.
Badiyaa has been tracking the Doom marketing push for weeks, from the Doctor Doom popcorn bucket with glowing green eyes to the Captains America TV spot. A Halloween gag staged by the two leads themselves costs the studio nothing and reached more people than most of it.
How Downey and Pascal ended up on opposite sides
Here is the road from Iron Man to Doom, as Badiyaa pieces it together from the public record:
- July 27, 2024, San Diego Comic-Con: Downey appears among a group of cloaked Doom figures, removes the mask and says “New mask, same task.” Marvel confirms him as Victor von Doom and retitles Avengers 5 as Avengers: Doomsday, with the Russo brothers directing.
- March 2025: Marvel reveals 26 more cast members in a livestream that runs close to five and a half hours, with Pascal’s Fantastic Four among them.
- April 28 to September 19, 2025: Filming at Pinewood Studios in England, with location work in Bahrain.
- July 25, 2025: The Fantastic Four: First Steps, directed by Matt Shakman, introduces Pascal’s Reed Richards in a retro-futurist world.
- December 18, 2026: Avengers: Doomsday opens in more than 4,000 US theaters, two days after the UK date of December 16, with a listed running time of about 165 minutes.
That release puts the costume swap seven weeks before Doom and Richards meet on screen for real. Advance ticket sales for the film passed $50 million by early September, 100 days out, the first film to do so in that window.
Downey’s reel is still up on his account, and the Doomsday countdown clock in every trailer now reads under 50 days to December 18.
Further reading
Image: Gabriel Hutchinson, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
