Avengers: The Kang Dynasty Canceled, Marvel’s New Plan Revealed
Avengers: The Kang Dynasty has been retitled Avengers 5 in the wake of Jonathan Majors’ recent guilty verdict. On December 18, the Kang actor was found guilty by a Manhattan jury of reckless assault in the third degree and harassment. Marvel subsequently dropped Majors from any future projects.
Marvel had already been positioning Jonathan Majors’ Kang as a huge player in the MCU, slowly building him out to be the next Thanos-level threat in projects like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Loki. Loki creator Michael Waldron was also tapped to take on the newly dubbed Avengers 5 back in November. The project was still in early phases, and filming hadn’t begun, so that course correction wouldn’t be as difficult for Marvel to tackle.
In fact, since Majors was first brought up on charges in March, Marvel has had time to plan for this possibility. It’s likely that the studio and Michael Waldron were holding off on any development of Avengers: The Kang Dynasty in case Majors was found guilty. Now, the MCU can go one of two ways with the Kang storyline it has been constructing since the first season of Loki.
Perhaps the simplest choice would be to simply recast Jonathan Majors and have Avengers 5 or an earlier project introduce a new actor as Kang. This wouldn’t be the first time that the MCU has recast a major character, with Edward Norton being replaced by Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk and Terence Howard being replaced by Don Cheadle as Rhodey/War Machine. Unlike those characters, there’s actually precedent for Kang to have a new face since there are so many variants of the character.
As Loki showed us, there can be very different-looking variants of the same person across the multiverse, with the first season showing us a female Loki, a kid Loki, and even an alligator Loki. It’s actually a bit strange that Kang would be the only character to have the same face across the vast multiverse. Avengers 5 could start by introducing the new variant of Kang, and audiences likely wouldn’t even blink at the change.
Of course, the more extreme route to take is to pivot to a brand new villain in Avengers 5 and move away from the Kang storyline altogether. Loki Season 2 actually put sort of a neat button on the Kang storyline, so this might be the move that makes more sense for the MCU.
It also fits in nicely with our theory that Revanna Renslayer and Miss Minutes from Loki are the same person. It’s easy to imagine them taking over as the Marvel universe’s big bad, given how that series ended.
If Marvel really wants to make fans happy, then all they have to do is make the recent rumors that Marvel might be leaning toward Doctor Doom as the next big villain a reality.
Doctor Doom is by far one of the most requested Marvel villains that has yet to show up in the MCU, especially because the character hasn’t really been done justice in the cinematic world yet. In any case, switching to Doctor Doom or changing the Kang actor are definitely both viable strategies for Avengers 5.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
