SPOILERS Below!
In the recent season two finale of Loki, the multiversal disaster that threatened to end all of reality was fixed when the newly-minted God of Stories took his place at the heart of the multiverse. The cause of all of this madness was Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror/He Who Remains, but when all was said and done, the villain was essentially sidelined and played little part in the resolution. In the epilogue, members of the TVA dismiss Kang and his remaining variants, making a passing mention of events in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. In short, Kang does not feel like a villain meant to be a Thanos-like threat worthy of two whole Avengers movies.
Did Marvel just write off Kang as a major threat? That seems to be the case, as author Joanna Robinson ( of the new book “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios”) revealed in a House of R podcast episode that Marvel is moving on from Kang, and scrapping the Kang Dynasty film entirely.
“I heard from someone recently…the screenwriter Jeff Loveness, who wrote ‘Quantumania,’ was supposed to write ‘The Kang Dynasty’…anyway, it’s confirmed. I had it confirmed to me he’s no longer working for Marvel. I asked the person why, and they said the reason why is he was all wrapped up in this Kang storyline and they are likely going to be moving away from that.”
If true, it’d be hard to blame Marvel for any of this. For one thing, Majors is in the middle of a very high-profile domestic abuse allegation that doesn’t seem to be going away. Fans have been waiting for Marvel to drop the hammer on him for a while, anyway. His role in Loki season two was clearly diminished.
But the bigger reason might be that fans haven’t taken to this multiverse storyline at all. Marvel is in the middle of the worst slump in the franchise’s history with Kang all over the place in TV and movies. Audiences aren’t buying it, so why keep trying to force something to work that simply isn’t?
At the same time, this can’t be taken as gospel. Robinson has a lot of insider info but Marvel doesn’t leak info the way a lot of other studios do. And their plans shift all of the time, so who knows if Robinson’s info is still fresh and accurate?
