With Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Marvel has ushered in the so-called fifth phase of its (infinite?) conveyer belt of superhero media. Supposedly, the distinction is important. Post-Quantumania, though, it seems like it’d be far more helpful to label the next batch of Marvel films and TV shows as “the Jonathan Majors phase”. He’s just that good.
Majors – of TV’s Lovecraft Country and one of the stars of the forthcoming Creed III – isn’t entirely new to the MCU, having popped up at the end of Disney Plus’s Loki, where he offered Tom Hiddleston’s trickster god a few portentous warnings of what’s to come. But Quantumania offers us Majors’s proper introduction as Marvel’s new “big bad”: a mysterious time traveller named Kang the Conqueror. Or Kangs the Conquerors, to get technical, since the franchise’s new obsession with multiverses means we’ve been promised multiple Kangs from multiple timelines down the line. Quantumania, really, is a Kang film. Any and all Ant-Man-related hijinks, as dorky and good-natured as they might be, are basically an afterthought.
