One of the best parts of being a Marvel fan is knowing what’s coming. Because of the franchise’s sprawling scope, fans can look at release dates set years in the future and know who or what the Avengers will have to deal with next. After the huge threat Thanos posed to the universe, the bar was set high for the next Big Bad of the MCU, and the appearance of Jonathan Majors as Kang in Loki Season 1 seemed to be the perfect choice.
But issues, both in-universe and out-, are now making a Kang-focused future look increasingly unwieldy, and there are hints Marvel won’t be following the path we thought they would for the next few years. And if you look carefully, the signs have been there for a while.
On The Ringer’s House of R podcast, journalist Joanna Robinson revealed that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania writer Jeff Loveness would no longer be writing the upcoming Avengers movie Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.
According to Robinson, this move is due to the Marvel Cinematic Universe moving away from Kang as their future Big Bad. This is likely due to both Jonathan Majors’ domestic abuse charges and the lukewarm reception to Quantumania, which was Kang’s official MCU debut after Loki gave us a more peaceful variant. There’s no official announcement or retitle of the movie just yet, but this shift means we’ll likely see a different direction in this crossover film than we first thought.
This isn’t a big surprise to fans who watched the Loki Season 2 finale. After having Kang be hyped up as a multiversal threat in Season 1, by the end of Season 2 he’s simply a file on Mobius’ desk. “I guess one of ’em caused a little bit of a ruckus on a 616 adjacent realm, but they handled it. So, we’re all good for now,” Mobius says of the Kang variants, seemingly confirming that the events of Quantumania were more or less inconsequential. They’re not even going to recast Kang, but will move in a new direction instead.
While we may not know what the MCU’s Plan B is, it’s good to see that the franchise is willing to pivot as circumstances change, ditching both problematic actors and bad storylines in the process. Now the only question left is just who will remain to threaten the Avengers after He Who Remains.
