A couple of days ago, I wrote a piece based on a “take it with lots of salt” report that writer Quantumania Jeff Loveness had been removed from Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, and that overall, Marvel was said to be moving away from Jonathan Majors’ Kang as it’s main villain of this phase of the MCU.
Now, there’s news that Kang Dynasty director, Destin Daniel Cretton has left, moving back to work on the Shang-Chi sequel (he directed the first one) and an upcoming Wonder Man series.
All of this leads to the somewhat inevitable conclusion that yes, The Kang Dynasty is probably dead in its current form, and that would suggest that the reports that Marvel is moving away from Kang after Quantumania performed poorly and Loki seemingly wrapped up a major Kang storyline. The reason why is likely some combination of the idea that the Kang storylines are not landing in order to build him up as a Thanos/Ultron level big bad, but also that Jonathan Majors has been charged with many, many crimes and while innocent until proven guilty, Marvel may not want to rest the entire current arc of the MCU on that going his way.
The idea is that perhaps The Kang Dynasty will not be completely killed, but just turned into a different Avengers film, perhaps splitting Secret Wars into two different movies like Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. Two halves of one conflict. It’s possible that was happening before, in a sense, but with Kang as a major player. But now he’s probably…not.
We have been hearing about breaking Fantastic Four casting news for the last 24 hours, and of course that brings rumblings that Doctor Doom is on the horizon. But also, we’re now hearing additional rumors that Marvel is going after Javier Bardem to play Galactus, one of the biggest of big bads in the Marvel universe. Though it’s unclear if he’d be arriving in the next two Avengers films.
All signs point to Marvel trying to be done with the Kang storyline. At this point, we have had Kang the Conqueror be defeated in Quantumania, and then two variants stopped/erased in Loki season 2. The only “to be continued” Kang things are a brief mention of variants at the end of Loki, and the post-credits “Council of Kangs” scene in Quantumania. But as I’ve said, it does not feel like on their face, any future MCU films need to make use of Kang at all; Deadpool 3, Captain America 4, Thunderbolts, Blade, Fantastic Four. If he was in those, he’d have to be shoehorned in or another post-credits tease.
I really do not think it should be hard to move away from Kang. There are still years until these 2026+ Avengers movies and plenty of time to pivot away from both Majors and Kang. I do think this might have gone different if not for Majors’ legal problems, as he has done a genuinely great job of acting as all three Kang variants. But here we are.
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