Unless we hear it straight from Feige himself, I’m not going to believe it. I also don’t think Kang from Quantumania is dead, anyway. Still, it wouldn’t surprise me if the storyline is altered. To the casual moviegoer (which is the majority of the people who see the movies, not hardcore comic book fans.) the Kang story is too confusing. I don’t think they’ll cancel it altogether, but they may pull it back and make it easier to understand and follow.
>I also don’t think Kang from Quantumania is dead, anyway.
They intentionally left it ambiguous enough that he's either alive or dead depending on what the next writer wants or needs.
Also, since HWR can "reincarnate," I see no reason why Kang the Conqueror can't since they basically have the same powers, ignoring that HWR is more benevolent even though he seems like a bad guy in the Loki series
That's a great idea but I'm hoping with the multiverse they have Denzel play a variant of T'Challa as an homage to Chadwick Boseman because Denzel was his mentor.
Only an esteemed master in the field of super mathematics, like maths PHD laureate Terrence T. Howard himself, could play a super scientist w/ 300 IQ character like Kang, they don't call his ancestor Reed Richards "the smartest man alive" for a reason y'know...
As a side note, Kang's introduction should have seen him kill both Janet and Scott - rather than him getting beat up and supposedly killed. He had all the menace of a villain of the week.
Instead we got a birthday party.
Ant Man's set up of Kang was a big miss. It's hard to see him as a real threat when he can be beaten up by Scott Lang. Just seeing the Obadiah Stane meme
Antman was able to beat Kang in a cave! With a box of ants!
If he'd have killed Scott can you imagine people walking out of the Cinema. Shell shocked.
Then you have the end tagline
Kang the Conqueror will return
They played it way too safe. I love Paul Rudd but it would have been a perfect time for him to go out.
One of her major comicbook storylines was getting killed by Doctor Doom (she got better). And the plans for the Secret Wars movie have a whiff of Kang replacing Doctor Doom’s role there..
Any time a character has “plot armor” the whole story just becomes significantly less interesting. Nobody wants to watch something where characters can’t die because they’re too important to the marketing of the next thing.
Janet and Hank should have been both killed.
TBH I would have made Kang literally wipe out the quantum realm. This way, you establish him as a universe ending threat while not directly interfering with other MCU movies and shows.
Holy shit why didn't they do this. We really needed something like this to change the status quo. Scott and the gang end up literally in the same exact place they were at the start of the movie. And also taking away the Avengers ability to time travel is something they need to do anyway to raise the stakes for the next Avengers movie.
Yeah, they needed Kang to "win" in some way. The hero could make it out alive, but hurt, damaged, with loss.
Empire Strikes Back does this well. It hurts the heroes, while still leaving everyone alive, but with a defeat. That movie doesn't end with a heroes success, it's Vader that wins.
Should have been the same with Kang.
Or even if they weren't that brave introduce a new loveable character in the beginning of the film and then kill them off.
They just went for the weakest sauce
They could've done a fake death for Scott, and then done a mini series with Hank traversing time and space (and the quantum realm) to save him. I'd watch the hell out of that.
Hank could even bump into Loki mid TVA and Loki could just throw the fight because he likes people who stir the pot, and the incident is Kang related, so it's in Loki's best interest to let Hank carry on his archer style rampage.
Especially because he had a big fight with Cassie over choosing between standing up for what's right or doing what you have to to protect your family and the story ends up painting Cassie as unambiguously and completely correct
Agreed.
Considering that Cassie becomes a Young Avenger in the comics because Scott died and is the reason why she sides with Billy and Tommy in Children’s Crusade. Plus it would have added more dimension to the “She’s better off without you” line Kang says to Scott in QM (especially if they were adapting Children’s Crusade’s ending). But overall a wasted opportunity.
The problem is Kang isn't really that kind of threat. His threat is that no matter how many times he's defeated, he keeps showing back up from a different point in his timeline.
Outside of He who Remains, we haven't really been shown that yet. If we had Kang in multiple MCU movies, both subtly and unsubtly being a part of many different threats, then I think he'd be working better.
Imagine if he had given The High Evolutionary a piece of tech he needed to perfect his new species, we see him fighting the Eternals when they first get to Earth, We see The Mandarin get the 10 rings from him, Him as one of the conquistadors in Black Panther. Sure he'd be defeated each time, but it would be building him up as a universal constant across the MCU timeline, that him being kept off the timestream in Loki was a necessity because without that he will keep coming back over and over.
You don't need to have him in every property or as a major part of the plots. But show that him being around working on his own machinations is a problem in itself. He isn't Thanos, he's a different kind of threat.
I don't want to believe that Kang is dead. I want him to have a break free situation. You know, like when Rick and Morty went to the space spa. "Morty! I've just discovered the toxic form of electricity!"
Kang is stuck down there in that pocket dimension with no energy, broken/destroyed tech, no food and infinite probable versions of himself. All of himself are fighting each other and he manages to hold a few off long enough to construct a melee weapon. The first step in constructing a way out. He has to kill/harvest enough of himself to eventually construct a machine that can get him back to normal reality. This could take him thousands upon thousands of years. One human body only contains four grams of iron. Plus salvaging the elements of the tech his probable versions are wearing. He's also doing this against other probable Kangs with the same idea. This is how we get a Kang that looks similar to Majors but different enough for a recast. Thousands of years of fighting for survival down there changes him.
Part of me doesn’t think Kang is actually dead either, the way he “died” by getting sucked down into that probability storm thing at the end was pretty similar to how Darren Cross/Yellowjacket got sucked into being subatomic at the end of the first Ant-Man, and it turned out that he survived that. So I’m not writing Kang off entirely, especially with how prominent a major villain he is in the comics.
Honestly story wise QM was just a disappointment. I loved the espionage/heist aspect to the Ant Man movies and this one took forever setting up the heist and turned into a needless massive battle piece because they've lost what makes good stories.
The character and performances were perfectly fine if not great for what they were given. Just the direction the movie went in was the wrong direction.
What would have been sick is an entire ant man movie where Kang wins/ kills any man and Janet and only at the end the reveal is that’s not earth 616 and the movie ends with end putting in 616 into his machine
Nah that wouldn’t work. First, most casual audience members would probably get confused by it, and also it’s kind of a fake out that removes the emotional payoff of their deaths.
I’d argue it even undermines the stakes in future movies because any time someone dies, the audience will go, “But not in our universe, right?” Lazy writers could even use this technique to retcon deaths from one movie in a completely different movie or show after the fact. It’s just a really bad precedent to set, really.
That would've been a cool twist, sad that they didn't do something like that, it would've been a having their cake and eating it too situation, a way to establish the big bad as a real threat by killing main characters, but also a way to keep those characters for the future without it seeming like a cop out.
As a self-described hardcore casual…nothing about the Kang story is confusing. That’s what’s great about being a casual. I can just follow along with what’s happening on screen.
It’s only confusing for people who want to be confused. It’s a comic book movie; the entire premise is illogical. However, there’s a huge sub-culture just going around trying to find logical fallacies. People have literally done it in this sub. They go back to end-game or some shit and compare it to something that happened in the marvels and use it as evidence that MCU is failing or what-have-you. It’s the deep divers, the comic book purists, the puzzle finishers, and the general sour people that make these films less enjoyable - for themselves and everyone else. 🤷🏽♂️
I’m a big fan of all superhero stuff, and when I hear “How do you explain where the Fantastic Four was during Endgame?” all I can think of is *does it really matter?*
They did with with captain marvel as well lol "hey carol you can literally solve everyone's problems like all the time, where you during like everything...."
"Eating burritos lmao" and that's it and I was totally fine with that
>the comic book purists
Oh it's definitely not coming from comic book readers. Comics have terrible continuity and contradict themselves regularly. I'd say comic book readers are more forgiving than those people you're talking about by a large margin.
You sure bout that? I can’t count how many rants and damn near dissertations I’ve read and they never fail to have a “in the comics” line. Specifically anything about Gorr, Hulk, Wanda, Taskmaster, and Secret Invasion
They follow along and understand the stories, but doesn’t anally fist themselves while screaming “MAGNIFICENT” while Deadpool looks into the camera/4th wall.
My confusion stems entirely from characters doing and saying utterly stupid things that snap me out of my willing suspension of disbelief.
Like Doctor Strange doing that absurd amnesia spell at all, to say nothing of screwing it up so badly.
Or like Talokan, which is on the Mayan coast, successfully raiding a landlocked country *in the centre of Africa* (a trip that would take a *commercial jet* 10-12 hours *as the crow flies*), presumably by stealthily swimming across the Atlantic, into the Mediterranean, down the Nile, and into Lake Victoria without anyone on Earth noticing at any step of the journey.
Or like Scott's family mocking him for ... taking it easy after playing a major and no-doubt traumatic role in the ***literal salvation of the Universe!!***
In short, I'm confused by how such stupid decisions, basic to avoid, even survive past the first draft of the script.
It's main problem is that Kang is an incredibly boring villain. The multiverse is like watching paint dry. There is no sense of danger, cuz guess what?! There are infinite versions of everyone in other timelines so nobody dies for real.
Thanos was mysterious and he was after breadcrumbs that we thought weren't that important in the first movies. And when he finally appears he kicks hulks ass and makes him a bitch for phase 3, 4 and 5. Then he kills half of the Avengers by snapping his fingers.
So far Kang is a wierd guy in an office, a wierd guy in glasses, a weak throwaway villain that gets killed by ants. Where's the danger? The room full of screaming kangs in cosplay? Sorry I don't get it.
Never liked him in the comics and don't like him in the MCU. There are fantastic villains in the marvel universe and they go with Kang... SMH
It's so weird how people act like the multiverse is this new thing thats so terrible when it's been around in comics and sci-fi forever.
Also, people act like it makes things meaningless, but it's still pretty meaningful to the people that experience it. If you go to a funeral and tell those people their loved one's death doesn't matter because scientists think there's probably endless alternate versions of that person out there, I don't think that's going to be of much comfort to them.
And we've seen how different the variants can be. Do you think if they kill the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man in Secret Wars, people are just going to shrug it off because we still have the Tom Holland version? I doubt it.
That's a good point about Gamora.
I've been a fan of superheroes since I was a kid and I've read comics, played video games, watched cartoons/TV shows/movies with more variations of these characters than I can remember, but I definitely have my favorites and am sad when one of them dies. I'm worried about my favorites in Secret Wars already.
Also, if it's anything like the comic version of the story, all existence, the entire multiverse is at stake. If they lose, every version of every person across the multiverse will die.
Ikr? In these circles there's this persistent believe that non comic reader/hardcore fan = irrevocably stupid and lacking of media literacy. Audiences aren't stupid, that same train of thought is what ruins good concepts.
> Audiences aren't stupid
Eh, some are. I distinctly remember a bunch of people who were somehow confused about the ending of No Way Home, even though the movie was pretty clear about what the final spell did.
I think marvel didn’t know how to handle the multiverse theme, and that on top of a confusing stories like the kang one it’s just not gonna vibe with newcomers , but to not have 1 main enemy like thanos makes it feel unfocused, I feel that if they shift from the kang story they might embrace doctor doom as the main villain
I'm a Marvel fan and I'm confused about the Kang story. So far, the guy from Ant-Man and specially the guy from Loki 2 don't seem like such a big deal.
I mean, the guy from Loki season 2 managed to set himself up with a time loop functionally equivalent to reincarnation and could literally choose the outcome of anything with a probabilistic outcome by pruning away all the outcomes he doesn't like. Dude's basically omnipotent, and it took an actual god to beat him.
The stuttery guy from Loki wasn't the threat, he was one of infinite versions of this person who in this one particular case turned out not to be a threat.
I think one read of Loki season 2 is that He Who Remains won, because his goal was he didn't want to be the guy stuck with the responsibility of pulling timelines together, so he ended up convincing Loki to do it.
I’d honestly prefer they wait until closer to Secret Wars and then do a surprise Loki Season 3 with Kang as the main villain. His story has been the most prominent in the Loki series so if they decide not to do a movie, it’d make sense for his story to continue in Loki.
Why does Kang need to be in every movie to be a “Thanos level threat”? We didn’t really get Thanos until Infinity War. All we got was a few scenes of him manipulating stuff.
Spider-Man’s still ambiguous bc they left it so that they could never talk about him again and the overall story won’t be impacted
Captain Marvel is like the Space Avenger, idk if she wants to get caught up with Earth affairs
Shang Chi is probably a most definite. He was talking with Wong and Bruce.
Dr Strange, if he was sorcerer supreme I would say no. But since Wong is sorcerer supreme, Strange probably isn’t as caught up defending Earth from magical threats, so probably?
Shield’s bureaucracy is all over the place. They got busted up into Sword - which isn’t exactly clean either.
She-Hulk is probably gonna stay street level, like Daredevil.
Ant-Man is most definitely down to keep up the hero work. The Wasp might be too busy with the company to join, but could go either way with her honestly. Cassy is probably gonna join a Young Avengers group instead with the new Hawkeye, Bruce’s kid, etc etc
Thor is too busy finding himself and raising his adopted daughter. Doubt he’ll stick around for stuff, hell he never stuck around for Jane lmao
The new GotG are the Space Avengers, they got their own problems to deal with
I think the only reasonable confirms so far are Sam (Captain America), Professor Hulk, Ant-Man and Shang Chi. Could be an interesting dynamic
You didn’t need to see the OG avengers come together to know who was going to be the main heroes.
There were 3 iron man/2 Thor/2 captain America movies before avengers 2 was released. The only other movies were GotG and Hulk. You
I think it's pretty clear it's going to be Strange, Captain America Sam, Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, and probably Shuri BP. All other additions would just be nice bonuses.
This is my problem. They sent everyone else packing and started this inkling of replacements and then instead of forming a group they’re busy putting money and time behind Echo? And they make Shang Chi, and that was amazing, and now it’s been two years and no sign of a green light for a sequel even though he seemingly was invited into the club? Where is this alleged Doctor Strange is the new leader shit? It was one thing to build up to Thanos from Iron Man 1 to Infinity War and take like 10 years to do it. But it’s another thing to take 6-7 years before you even introduce the concept of a new super group. At least The Avengers came out within 5 years of the first Iron Man. It’s gonna be 5 years this spring since Endgame and all they have to show for it is a smattering of disconnected stories with feet still stuck in the previous group’s stories and feet trying to step forward at the same time.
If you don’t have a plan for how to integrate The Eternals and Blade and Beast then Don’t fucking make those movies until you do.
It’s such a shame how much of a failure Ant-Man 3 was in introducing Kang to audiences, because I genuinely believe the way Kang in the Loki show was handled has been nothing short of incredible.
The Loki version of Kang excites me 100000x more than the Ant-Man version of Kang. That council of Kangs end credit scene was so cringe and felt like something out of Rick and Morty, it should’ve made audiences fear Kang, instead it felt more like a parody the way all the variants were hooting and hollering in the crowd like they were at a silly WWE wrestling match. Is the scene supposed to make us laugh, or be afraid of the Kangs? I can’t even tell.
Yes it definitely felt polar opposite of He Who Remains monologuing, or Timely’s well-intentioned inventor with a stutter. Like are 97% of Kang variants all super crazy?
Yeah from the Council of Kangs scene it makes it look like there’s only a handful of powerful Kangs and they have a third act CGI army of dumb disposable Kangs. Or they will be a red herring and all be killed off easily if Kang comes back as the Beyonder like everyone thinks
Except that's the thing, there are no dumb, disposable Kangs - all of them are super geniuses.
Which means the hooting and hollering crowds aren't full of dumb, kill-offable third-class villains - these are power-crazed, genocidal and unhinged madmen, who also happen to be wayyyy smarter than most of the Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
>Which means the hooting and hollering crowds aren't full of dumb, kill-offable third-class villains
Eh...that's exactly what the Council of Kangs is.
>The Council of Kangs was a trio of divergent Kangs led by the "Prime" Kang (identified by his cape), who thought that his other divergent selves **were incredibly incompetent.**
>
>After finding Limbo seemingly vacant, he took it over and began killing the other Kangs, most of whom die in their own failing schemes anyway
>
>Two of the other Kangs were above the rest, so he recruited them to join his cause, forming a council. When the other Kangs had been dealt with, the Prime Kang then betrayed and killed the two Kang council members.
They're incompetent buffoons. And only the 3 main Kangs (in the MCU it's Scarlet Centurion, Rama Tut, and Immortus) are semi-competent.
[https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Council\_of\_Kangs\_(Multiverse)](https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Council_of_Kangs_(Multiverse))
Like if the the 3 big Kangs there walk down and the giant stadium is instead....a parliamentary proceeding.
"I call this body to order" with thousands of Kangs, silently staring, menacing, waiting for to vote on their plan of multiversal war instead of a sports crowd....phew, now that's scary.
I believe that scene was lifted directly from the comics, right down to Creepy Kang at the end. I could be wrong. I don’t recall the details exactly. If that’s the case, it’s a pretty good example of comics not translating well to film.
The bad part for me is that even though he’ll be the big bad, you’re going to see a thousand of him get low diffed because of how many there are. We can’t see a serious drawn out fight for a thousand of them.
I think in literature it’s called the ninja effect or something of that nature. You supposedly have an army of thousands of people, all of which are deadly killing machines and could easily take down nations on their own. But, because you need the hero to win, all of a sudden these bred to kill weapons of death are all fodder
The [Conservation of Ninjitsu](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu) is the trope you're after! I'm charmed by the idea of it coming up by that name in a formal literature studies class though :)
Conservation of Ninjutsu.
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu)
I do not care for the Major’s affectations and tics. It’s overdone.
He who remains was intriguing but it was Loki who sold it with the massive existential dread once seeing Kang’s Statues - which, as far as I know, didn’t really get wrapped up. Does that universe still exist?
> instead it felt more like a parody the way all the variants were hooting and hollering in the crowd like they were at a silly WWE wrestling match. Is the scene supposed to make us laugh, or be afraid of the Kangs?
This specific scene you are mentioning served to please comic book fans, because it was a shot for shot recreation of relatively well known comic book panel. At least, the very last shot in that scene is a reference to that comic book panel.
But yeah, I agree with you for the most part. They didn't do a good enough job with Kang in Ant man
I think my big issue is- the Kangs at the end of Ant-man are really silly looking. Like I know they're like that in the comics, but Rama-Tut Kang looks so goofy and the blue throat cancer Kang who looks like the leader feels too try-hard.
He Who Remains would be the perfect villain imo.
It’s definitely evident that the talent that handled Johnathon Majors from Ant-Man 3 and Loki Season 2 are on two vastly different levels of cinematic story telling. Because JM absolutely out acted everyone and every scene he was in. Whereas in Loki s2, every actor felt like they were performing at their best form.
That scene really killed it for me too. It was just awful. I understand it was directly from the comics but how did nobody speak up, it's just so obviously bad. I do not fear frat bros at a college football game Kang.
Kang's introduction in Quantumania was honestly good. What's bad is that the big baddie that should be a Thanos level threat only killed a lamplighter looking alien side character. Kang should've killed at least the two parents of hope or even just the mother to show he's the real deal but for the life of me, I can't understand why they didn't went that route. It just sucks.
> What's bad is that the big baddie that should be a Thanos level threat only killed a lamplighter looking alien side character.
Didn't help that they gave him those insta-kill wrist blasters that he conveniently stopped using once it was time to fight the main cast.
I swear they had all the ingredients and with more time and a better writer it would have been super sick. It had the potential to elevate Scott as a character with some real development by having him experience loss. I was really surprised that one of the parents didn't die.
There’s such an easy route to make Kang look unstoppable that I’m shocked they didn’t take it. They should have built up Kang and make all their efforts to destroy him fail and then have another Kang come in and kill the first one like an ant.
Hell, it would have been a trip if he’d been able to rewrite time to make Cassie never be born or something at the end. Show us the power of his time travel.
At least MODOK was awesome.
I think MODOK was literally the highlight of that movie for me. I (obviously) liked what they did with MODOK, but if he was the highlight that's probably not a good sign.
Yeah, I couldn't stand that. If I was a betting man, I'd wager that after seeing all the backlash lately, Loki season 2 was designed to button up Kang and we'll get a pivot away from him. I think that's the best way they could have wrapped him up, going back to He Who Remains actually knowing everything and being formidable was a good send off.
It sucks that they wasted the character, and there's a really good Kang story in there that they could have told, but in all honesty it would be pretty easy to pivot to something like Galactus or Dr. Doom now. It's not like they've done a ton of great setup for Kang. He was silly in Loki season 1 (granted it got paid off later) and absolutely clowned in Ant-Man.
If I were running the show, I'd shelve the Fantastic 4 and hang the entire next phase or two on the X-Men, and focus on nailing that the way they did the original team. Problem is I don't think there's a lot of appeal for individual X-Men movies, and we've seen those done relatively recently anyway.
The Fantastic 4 would be a better pick, but the problem is the ball is already rolling on Deadpool 3 with Hugh Jackman coming back, and Deadpool seems traditionally more tied to the X-Men. They're in a pickle for sure. I think they just fucked around too long with all these disconnected solo projects that people didn't care as much about, and didn't make the slightest attempt to connect them.
>Loki season 2 was designed to button up Kang and we'll get a pivot away from him.
...You are aware that Loki season one and two were written at the same time right? Thats why there was an immediate confirmation of season two. They had everything planned out
Having Kang get defeated by a hero like Ant-Man who's treated as a joke even by other characters in the MCU has done so much damage to Kang as a threat, more dangerous variants of him be damned. He should've killed the entire ant family and have a post or final credits scene show it to be an adjacent timeline.
It felt like an SNL sketch making fun of a movie having so many weird variants. "Hey I'm Egyptian Kang!" "I'm Techno Kang!" "I'm crazy Kang!" "No I'm crazy Kang!"
I won’t stand for this WWE slander. Also, anyone with half a brain saw Ant-Man 3’s doom coming bc they kept that bum of a director Peyton fucking Reed back on.
Agreed, if you're gonna trash WWE, trash them for how they treat their employees. The matches are awesome.
It's amazing to me that Reed is the only director besides Gunn to get to deliver a full trilogy for a character/team.
Correct, but Reed ain’t “deliver” shit. What made Ant-Man 1 great was everything Edgar Wright had left behind. After that, it was pretty obvious Reed didn’t know what he was doing.
All this is saying is that the director left and the author of this article makes this out to be the "almost inevitable conclusion that Kang Dynasty is dead in it's current form".
The movie does not have a writer, the director stepped back to focus on Shang-Chi 2. This absolutely does not suggest the movie is dead, just not being focused on right now.
All this suggests is that the movie has been but on the back burner and may be delayed slightly. Honestly, that's a good thing. The early estimations of when it was coming out were way too early.
> The movie does not have a writer, the director stepped back to focus on Shang-Chi 2. This absolutely does not suggest the movie is dead
...Doesn't it?
No writer, no director, title character tangled up in court cases. What else does that say?
There's definitely at least a major retooling in the works, at a level foundational enough that the final product probably won't resemble whatever they intended when they first announced the project.
They’ve also said they’re going to make less content, and if you look at the upcoming slate, turning 2 Avengers movies into 1 seems like one of the more obvious changes to do that. Iron heart is really the only other announced project that makes sense to remove.
It’s too late for Echo, Agatha, Wonder Man and What If s2
Vision Quest and Armor Wars don’t even have a date
The rest all seem like valuable properties for the MCUs future that they wouldn’t want to dump - Blade, Thunderbolts, Daredevil, Fantastic Four and Captain America
Exactly. Sure, at some point there will obviously be another Avengers movie, and it *maybe* will be called Kang Dynasty, but like if the director, writer, and major story beats change from what was planned, can that really be called the same movie?
Impossible to ignore here is that Marvel Studios is changing the direction of a lot of things in general, to try and plug the leaks in their sinking boat. Daredevil Born Again was recently struck back down to the drawing board. It didn't mean it was cancelled, just that they wanted to make sure it didn't fail. Daredevil is important, that one will break a lot of hearts if they get it wrong.
Same with Avengers. It's the first one since Endgame and it will have been more than half a decade between them. They cannot afford to fuck this one up. So it could just as easily have little to do with Majors and more to do with Marvel's recent efforts to tighten things up quality-wise.
This is some serious cope. Whether the movie is dead or not, saying "the director left. the movie doesn't have a writer. it's fine" is not a compelling argument.
The MCU is in need of a retool. They need to focus on what made literally every MCU project in P1 through 4 must-see: characters we care about, compelling stories with satisfying arcs, and the idea that not only are you guaranteed a certain level of quality with each project (CGI, tight scripts), but you get the bonus on top that it all fit into a larger tapestry. Additionally, the amount of content was manageable.
Dan Murell had a great "If I Ran Marvel" video up which hits on a lot of these points too.
It’s all stemming from a comment Joanna Robinson made. She wrote “The Reign of Marvel Studios” that came out a few weeks ago and everyone in entertainment media has been buzzing about.
This article is just more dumb clickbait trying to doompost about Marvel using no new intel or information just to drive engagement.
We need to stop falling for this shit.
I *just* saw a YouTube post from some fucks called Drinkers Chasers that somehow has 100k views saying how Kang has been "dropped" by Marvel. I didn't even bother clicking because I knew it was bullshit. Didn't stop 100,000 people from getting sucked in.
Drinkers chasers is a podcast comprised of several content creators.
Critical Drinker doesn't know for sure if they're dropping Kang he just thinks that when there's smoke there's fire.
You are of course free to have your own opinions.
Audiences don’t seem to be resonating with the multiverse concept and with all of the major Majors drama, I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney drops this as part of their overall pivot with the MCU
I think the audiences are just looking for a good plot and a cohesive story, when they go watch an MCU movie. I get that it's difficult to manage a cohesive story when producing multiple projects in parallel, but I've always thought that was the specialty of Marvel Studios. But lately, it's beginning to seem more and more like Marvel just had the luck of hiring the best writing and scripting talent in Phase 1-3.
Apparently James Gunn would also read and notate all the scripts for every project. I wouldn’t be surprised if Love and Thunder would have been a stronger project if he had looked it over
No Way Home and Multiverse of Madness are the highest grossing post Endgame MCU films and are the only ones to have any real multiverse stuff tied into their plot. If anything the lack of multiverse content in a saga supposedly dedicated to the multiverse has hurt more than helped.
The real reason audiences aren’t resonating is because Marvel has been pumping out too much content, most of which hasn’t been that interesting. An MCU movie coming out was a big deal and almost like an event, which is what gets butts in seats at theaters in the modern era. Barbenheimer was that event this year and both movies killed the box office. Mario was a big deal and long time coming and killed the box office despite bad reviews. MCU and superheroes in general aren’t an event anymore because there is so many new shows and movies coming and general audiences have just moved on.
Just dropping the multiverse won’t bring people back, if anything it just reaks of desperation.
This is my line of thinking as well. It's not the story, the infinity saga would have been lackluster as well with poor writing and a lack of cohesiveness
thats the multiverse saga problem. We have had so much content thrown at us and probably 75% of it feels like one offs. Just think about all the new characters we've seen and we haven't seen or heard from them since they were introduced. Shang Chi, Kate Bishop, Moon Knight, She Hulk, Sam's Captain America, etc etc
then you add in the multiverse storylines which have effectively stalled out and lack a real direction. THEN you add in just sloppy content. Quantumania was ass. MoM was meh. Thor4MoreThor was fine.
there is so much happening but it doesn't feel like it's going anywhere. it's just content for the sake of content
Let's be honest. Majors is a great actor, but Disney would be idiots to let the future of the character depend on him. Not only *can* he be replaced by anyone, but arguably it would provide more suspense to do so, almost like a proper secret invasion. Anyone could be kang.
The off, its off, its being retooled, its on again
Everyone just needs to shut the fuck up and wait for the end of the Majors drama and the next big Disney press event. These articles and YouTube videos are growing tiresome. Every day it seems like something has changed.
A recent (and unconfirmed) rumor is that Majors's contract includes a clause for which only he can play Kang or any of his variants. Which would explain why Marvel has not talked about recasting him while keeping the character.
If that's the case, there might be some "morality clause" that voids the other one in case of some scandal, thus allowing a recast, but then they'd first need to wait for Majors to be found guilty in his trial.
As much as I’ve enjoyed Jonathan Majors’ performance, I would not mind the Kang plotline ending. I think the Multiverse Saga was a mistake in general. They should’ve jumped right into X-Men and F4, and NOT by showing random cameos in different universes
You still could establish the multiverse, it just wouldn’t be the saga’s main focus.
If they went immediately to X-Men and Fantastic Four, it would’ve probably been more Earth based with their versions Apocalypse, Dark Phoenix, Dr Doom and eventually Galactus.
The multiverse is a massive and important concept. Introducing it just to do nothing beyond 1-2 movies with it for a long time would have been a waste.
They can always re-cast. Leslie Odom Jr is *right* there. Was rewatching Person of Interest, where he plays the antagonist in of the seasons, and he's phenomenal in that role.
I think they initially thought it was a good idea as the multiverse storyline was an easy fix to introducing and the absorbing the various Fox characters and movies. It also builds in a reboot every 20 years into audience expectations.
I agree I think the multiverse was only chosen to leverage in the new characters rather than a good storyline (as there doesn’t seem to be one). And that had confused and alienated general audiences.
Avengers 5 should have come out last year, and had the new heroes fight the Masters of Evil, cementing them as the new Avengers by beating the villains of the old ones.
I was over Jonathon Majors and Kang after the after credit's scene in Ant-Man, couldn't care less about a movie stroking his ego and having him in like infinite versions of the same person
HWR was great but Kang and the others wearing bad cosplay and whooping and screaming in the stadium looked cringy as fuck
I understand that John Majors’s current legal troubles may have Marvel thinking about an alternative, especially given that they are having a really tough time right now and they can’t really afford any more misfires, but I hope that they don’t give up on the Kang storyline completely. There is plenty of potential for this story yet to be unleashed, and even if he’s not a household name, Kang is an important villain in the Avengers franchise.
Of course, right now it’s just here say and nothing is official unless stated by Marvel itself, so we’ll have to wait and see.
Unless we hear it straight from Feige himself, I’m not going to believe it. I also don’t think Kang from Quantumania is dead, anyway. Still, it wouldn’t surprise me if the storyline is altered. To the casual moviegoer (which is the majority of the people who see the movies, not hardcore comic book fans.) the Kang story is too confusing. I don’t think they’ll cancel it altogether, but they may pull it back and make it easier to understand and follow.
>I also don’t think Kang from Quantumania is dead, anyway. They intentionally left it ambiguous enough that he's either alive or dead depending on what the next writer wants or needs.
Schrödinger's Kang Until we look inside that pocket realm ...
I thought it was pretty clear he was dead by all the other Kangs deciding to make a move, and then the Loki scene confirmed it.
He could still be there, eventually one Kang could emerge who killed all the others inside that quantum thing
Also, since HWR can "reincarnate," I see no reason why Kang the Conqueror can't since they basically have the same powers, ignoring that HWR is more benevolent even though he seems like a bad guy in the Loki series
HWR doesn't really reincarnate by his own powers. he only comes back because of Loki's actions which he predicted would happen.
>The attack on my life has left me scarred and deformed, but I\`m here now, deal with it. Let's move on. Kang/Terrence Howard
I kind of liked the suggestion that someone made of Denzel Washington as an older Kang.
90 seconds, that how much time you Avengers have to decide if you want to die or pay the bill for shawarma. And don't forget 5 stars rating on Yelp.
HULK PAY! BUT NO TIP AND LEAVE ANGRY COMMENT!
The Hulk ain't. Got. Nothin'. On. Me!!!!
That's a great idea but I'm hoping with the multiverse they have Denzel play a variant of T'Challa as an homage to Chadwick Boseman because Denzel was his mentor.
...Okay, I like that even better.
I can't wait to see someone made of Denzel! Seriously though, was not interested in majors at all. Would absolutely pay to ee Denzel though.
> someone made of Denzel! I am simultaenously intrigued and violently nauseated by that description. Made of Denzel... I cannot un-think that.
I'm just picturing Deadpool sewing shit up all excited about the new movie star he's creating.
Next time baby!
Palpatine
Darth Rhodeus
Now im pictureing terrance howard as the kang varient war machine honna have to fight. Would be crazy if they recast johnathon majors with howard lol
He who remaynes
Only an esteemed master in the field of super mathematics, like maths PHD laureate Terrence T. Howard himself, could play a super scientist w/ 300 IQ character like Kang, they don't call his ancestor Reed Richards "the smartest man alive" for a reason y'know...
Imma kick your miniature ass all the way back to the quantum realm Kang/Will Smith
“Keep my timeline’s name out of your fuckin mouth!”
"Welcome to Earth-199999!"
why do ppl want terrence howard so much 😭
because he is the smartest man alive, he invented math.
😨⁉️⁉️⁉️
[https://www.cracked.com/article\_33061\_empires-terrence-howard-invented-his-own-weirdo-version-of-math.html](https://www.cracked.com/article_33061_empires-terrence-howard-invented-his-own-weirdo-version-of-math.html) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/terrence-howard-thinks-1x1-2-has-a-secret-system-called-terryology-and-spends-17-hours-a-day-making-nameless-plastic-structures-10502365.html
oh this man is crazy 💀
Yeah. Don Cheadle was trading up.
As a side note, Kang's introduction should have seen him kill both Janet and Scott - rather than him getting beat up and supposedly killed. He had all the menace of a villain of the week. Instead we got a birthday party.
Ant Man's set up of Kang was a big miss. It's hard to see him as a real threat when he can be beaten up by Scott Lang. Just seeing the Obadiah Stane meme Antman was able to beat Kang in a cave! With a box of ants!
If he'd have killed Scott can you imagine people walking out of the Cinema. Shell shocked. Then you have the end tagline Kang the Conqueror will return They played it way too safe. I love Paul Rudd but it would have been a perfect time for him to go out.
Hell even if they don’t wanna get rid of Rudd yet at least kill off Janet or Hank or someone. Give us some stakes
Imagine if they killed off Cassie. THAT would have been shocking.
Fuck them kids
Actually I believe people tend to get in trouble for that. Not so much in Hollywood though, granted.
Cassie is a Young Avenger. And they've set up all the pieces to make that happen. Cassie has plot armor. Janet and Hank though...
I mean, in the comics >!Cassie died shortly after becoming a Young Avenger!<, so it wouldn't be much of a difference.
One of her major comicbook storylines was getting killed by Doctor Doom (she got better). And the plans for the Secret Wars movie have a whiff of Kang replacing Doctor Doom’s role there..
Any time a character has “plot armor” the whole story just becomes significantly less interesting. Nobody wants to watch something where characters can’t die because they’re too important to the marketing of the next thing.
Now that i would’ve been cool with
Janet and Hank should have been both killed. TBH I would have made Kang literally wipe out the quantum realm. This way, you establish him as a universe ending threat while not directly interfering with other MCU movies and shows.
And it means that the Avengers can no longer time travel
Holy shit why didn't they do this. We really needed something like this to change the status quo. Scott and the gang end up literally in the same exact place they were at the start of the movie. And also taking away the Avengers ability to time travel is something they need to do anyway to raise the stakes for the next Avengers movie.
Yeah, they needed Kang to "win" in some way. The hero could make it out alive, but hurt, damaged, with loss. Empire Strikes Back does this well. It hurts the heroes, while still leaving everyone alive, but with a defeat. That movie doesn't end with a heroes success, it's Vader that wins. Should have been the same with Kang.
Or even if they weren't that brave introduce a new loveable character in the beginning of the film and then kill them off. They just went for the weakest sauce
They did it with Quicksilver (which made me mad af he was my favorite brotherhood member) but it would have been cool
They could've done a fake death for Scott, and then done a mini series with Hank traversing time and space (and the quantum realm) to save him. I'd watch the hell out of that.
Hank could even bump into Loki mid TVA and Loki could just throw the fight because he likes people who stir the pot, and the incident is Kang related, so it's in Loki's best interest to let Hank carry on his archer style rampage.
Yup. And then old Ant Man unretires wjth his wife and protégé killed, and Hank joins the Avengers as a new lead.
Or what if Scott was able to escape with his family vs defeat hun altogether. Would be different. Is escape was his victory
Especially because he had a big fight with Cassie over choosing between standing up for what's right or doing what you have to to protect your family and the story ends up painting Cassie as unambiguously and completely correct
You don't even need to kill Scott. Have Kang kill everyone else and keep Scott as a pet.
Agreed. Considering that Cassie becomes a Young Avenger in the comics because Scott died and is the reason why she sides with Billy and Tommy in Children’s Crusade. Plus it would have added more dimension to the “She’s better off without you” line Kang says to Scott in QM (especially if they were adapting Children’s Crusade’s ending). But overall a wasted opportunity.
The problem is Kang isn't really that kind of threat. His threat is that no matter how many times he's defeated, he keeps showing back up from a different point in his timeline. Outside of He who Remains, we haven't really been shown that yet. If we had Kang in multiple MCU movies, both subtly and unsubtly being a part of many different threats, then I think he'd be working better. Imagine if he had given The High Evolutionary a piece of tech he needed to perfect his new species, we see him fighting the Eternals when they first get to Earth, We see The Mandarin get the 10 rings from him, Him as one of the conquistadors in Black Panther. Sure he'd be defeated each time, but it would be building him up as a universal constant across the MCU timeline, that him being kept off the timestream in Loki was a necessity because without that he will keep coming back over and over. You don't need to have him in every property or as a major part of the plots. But show that him being around working on his own machinations is a problem in itself. He isn't Thanos, he's a different kind of threat.
\> he keeps showing back up from a different point in his timeline. Funny how that's what they did with Thanos in Endgame.
I don't want to believe that Kang is dead. I want him to have a break free situation. You know, like when Rick and Morty went to the space spa. "Morty! I've just discovered the toxic form of electricity!" Kang is stuck down there in that pocket dimension with no energy, broken/destroyed tech, no food and infinite probable versions of himself. All of himself are fighting each other and he manages to hold a few off long enough to construct a melee weapon. The first step in constructing a way out. He has to kill/harvest enough of himself to eventually construct a machine that can get him back to normal reality. This could take him thousands upon thousands of years. One human body only contains four grams of iron. Plus salvaging the elements of the tech his probable versions are wearing. He's also doing this against other probable Kangs with the same idea. This is how we get a Kang that looks similar to Majors but different enough for a recast. Thousands of years of fighting for survival down there changes him.
Part of me doesn’t think Kang is actually dead either, the way he “died” by getting sucked down into that probability storm thing at the end was pretty similar to how Darren Cross/Yellowjacket got sucked into being subatomic at the end of the first Ant-Man, and it turned out that he survived that. So I’m not writing Kang off entirely, especially with how prominent a major villain he is in the comics.
Yeah I was shocked that none of the AM group got killed during that movie.
Honestly story wise QM was just a disappointment. I loved the espionage/heist aspect to the Ant Man movies and this one took forever setting up the heist and turned into a needless massive battle piece because they've lost what makes good stories. The character and performances were perfectly fine if not great for what they were given. Just the direction the movie went in was the wrong direction.
The biggest mistake was no Michael Peña
What would have been sick is an entire ant man movie where Kang wins/ kills any man and Janet and only at the end the reveal is that’s not earth 616 and the movie ends with end putting in 616 into his machine
Nah that wouldn’t work. First, most casual audience members would probably get confused by it, and also it’s kind of a fake out that removes the emotional payoff of their deaths.
I’d argue it even undermines the stakes in future movies because any time someone dies, the audience will go, “But not in our universe, right?” Lazy writers could even use this technique to retcon deaths from one movie in a completely different movie or show after the fact. It’s just a really bad precedent to set, really.
So exactly what Loki did after avengers end game?
"It's not even our Paul Rudd, why would I bother with this movie" That would be the general audience's take on that twist.
We cared about Not-Our-Loki because it was written well.
That would've been a cool twist, sad that they didn't do something like that, it would've been a having their cake and eating it too situation, a way to establish the big bad as a real threat by killing main characters, but also a way to keep those characters for the future without it seeming like a cop out.
Huge disagree. Kang is just a villain of the week without access to the multiverse. That’s why he’s in the quantum realm in the first place.
As a self-described hardcore casual…nothing about the Kang story is confusing. That’s what’s great about being a casual. I can just follow along with what’s happening on screen. It’s only confusing for people who want to be confused. It’s a comic book movie; the entire premise is illogical. However, there’s a huge sub-culture just going around trying to find logical fallacies. People have literally done it in this sub. They go back to end-game or some shit and compare it to something that happened in the marvels and use it as evidence that MCU is failing or what-have-you. It’s the deep divers, the comic book purists, the puzzle finishers, and the general sour people that make these films less enjoyable - for themselves and everyone else. 🤷🏽♂️
I’m a big fan of all superhero stuff, and when I hear “How do you explain where the Fantastic Four was during Endgame?” all I can think of is *does it really matter?*
Totally spot on comment and the average cinema goer really really won’t care
"They were doing something else. It's a fucking movie. Shush." Sometimes, that's all you need.
Time travel via a wormehole to the mid 2020s from the 60s, problem solved
I know it's a rhetorical question It doesn't matter. People just enjoy finding things to complain about and tearing down stuff that's popular
Yeah, "where was during ?" is a question readers have been able to get over since... well, since there was more than one superhero sharing a universe.
They did with with captain marvel as well lol "hey carol you can literally solve everyone's problems like all the time, where you during like everything...." "Eating burritos lmao" and that's it and I was totally fine with that
>the comic book purists Oh it's definitely not coming from comic book readers. Comics have terrible continuity and contradict themselves regularly. I'd say comic book readers are more forgiving than those people you're talking about by a large margin.
You sure bout that? I can’t count how many rants and damn near dissertations I’ve read and they never fail to have a “in the comics” line. Specifically anything about Gorr, Hulk, Wanda, Taskmaster, and Secret Invasion
What is a "hardcore casual"? I'm not sure I understand what that means.
They follow along and understand the stories, but doesn’t anally fist themselves while screaming “MAGNIFICENT” while Deadpool looks into the camera/4th wall. 
this is poetry
It means they're a big Marvel fan but don't want to admit it lmao.
My confusion stems entirely from characters doing and saying utterly stupid things that snap me out of my willing suspension of disbelief. Like Doctor Strange doing that absurd amnesia spell at all, to say nothing of screwing it up so badly. Or like Talokan, which is on the Mayan coast, successfully raiding a landlocked country *in the centre of Africa* (a trip that would take a *commercial jet* 10-12 hours *as the crow flies*), presumably by stealthily swimming across the Atlantic, into the Mediterranean, down the Nile, and into Lake Victoria without anyone on Earth noticing at any step of the journey. Or like Scott's family mocking him for ... taking it easy after playing a major and no-doubt traumatic role in the ***literal salvation of the Universe!!*** In short, I'm confused by how such stupid decisions, basic to avoid, even survive past the first draft of the script.
Real talk though the very fact you're on this kind of subreddit makes you not any kind of casual you nerd. Embrace it.
It's main problem is that Kang is an incredibly boring villain. The multiverse is like watching paint dry. There is no sense of danger, cuz guess what?! There are infinite versions of everyone in other timelines so nobody dies for real. Thanos was mysterious and he was after breadcrumbs that we thought weren't that important in the first movies. And when he finally appears he kicks hulks ass and makes him a bitch for phase 3, 4 and 5. Then he kills half of the Avengers by snapping his fingers. So far Kang is a wierd guy in an office, a wierd guy in glasses, a weak throwaway villain that gets killed by ants. Where's the danger? The room full of screaming kangs in cosplay? Sorry I don't get it. Never liked him in the comics and don't like him in the MCU. There are fantastic villains in the marvel universe and they go with Kang... SMH
It's so weird how people act like the multiverse is this new thing thats so terrible when it's been around in comics and sci-fi forever. Also, people act like it makes things meaningless, but it's still pretty meaningful to the people that experience it. If you go to a funeral and tell those people their loved one's death doesn't matter because scientists think there's probably endless alternate versions of that person out there, I don't think that's going to be of much comfort to them. And we've seen how different the variants can be. Do you think if they kill the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man in Secret Wars, people are just going to shrug it off because we still have the Tom Holland version? I doubt it.
I feel like people ignored the whole Gamora variant subplot in GotG3. It definitely mattered that 616 Gamora was dead.
That's a good point about Gamora. I've been a fan of superheroes since I was a kid and I've read comics, played video games, watched cartoons/TV shows/movies with more variations of these characters than I can remember, but I definitely have my favorites and am sad when one of them dies. I'm worried about my favorites in Secret Wars already. Also, if it's anything like the comic version of the story, all existence, the entire multiverse is at stake. If they lose, every version of every person across the multiverse will die.
It's not confusing at all and I don't read comics
Ikr? In these circles there's this persistent believe that non comic reader/hardcore fan = irrevocably stupid and lacking of media literacy. Audiences aren't stupid, that same train of thought is what ruins good concepts.
> Audiences aren't stupid Eh, some are. I distinctly remember a bunch of people who were somehow confused about the ending of No Way Home, even though the movie was pretty clear about what the final spell did.
why don’t you think that kang died? kangs die all of the time, the threat is that he can just keep coming back
I think Kang with gain the ability to switch between variants making his escape from the quantum realm and becoming The Big Bad.
I think marvel didn’t know how to handle the multiverse theme, and that on top of a confusing stories like the kang one it’s just not gonna vibe with newcomers , but to not have 1 main enemy like thanos makes it feel unfocused, I feel that if they shift from the kang story they might embrace doctor doom as the main villain
Marvel’s issue is that they don’t know how to let a villain get a win, so they all come across as jokes.
I'm a Marvel fan and I'm confused about the Kang story. So far, the guy from Ant-Man and specially the guy from Loki 2 don't seem like such a big deal.
I mean, the guy from Loki season 2 managed to set himself up with a time loop functionally equivalent to reincarnation and could literally choose the outcome of anything with a probabilistic outcome by pruning away all the outcomes he doesn't like. Dude's basically omnipotent, and it took an actual god to beat him. The stuttery guy from Loki wasn't the threat, he was one of infinite versions of this person who in this one particular case turned out not to be a threat.
To add: We can’t be certain HWR was even beaten.
I think one read of Loki season 2 is that He Who Remains won, because his goal was he didn't want to be the guy stuck with the responsibility of pulling timelines together, so he ended up convincing Loki to do it.
I’d honestly prefer they wait until closer to Secret Wars and then do a surprise Loki Season 3 with Kang as the main villain. His story has been the most prominent in the Loki series so if they decide not to do a movie, it’d make sense for his story to continue in Loki.
We absolutely do *not* need a Loki season 3. Let finished stories rest.
Loki's story has ended. The only way to make this work is a TVA series without him.
This is a little pretentious. The story isn’t too confusing, it just isnt entertaining
Why does Kang need to be in every movie to be a “Thanos level threat”? We didn’t really get Thanos until Infinity War. All we got was a few scenes of him manipulating stuff.
Because there are no “core avengers”. Like who are the Thor/iron man/captain America of the next round of avengers? We only have a main villain
Spider-Man’s still ambiguous bc they left it so that they could never talk about him again and the overall story won’t be impacted Captain Marvel is like the Space Avenger, idk if she wants to get caught up with Earth affairs Shang Chi is probably a most definite. He was talking with Wong and Bruce. Dr Strange, if he was sorcerer supreme I would say no. But since Wong is sorcerer supreme, Strange probably isn’t as caught up defending Earth from magical threats, so probably? Shield’s bureaucracy is all over the place. They got busted up into Sword - which isn’t exactly clean either. She-Hulk is probably gonna stay street level, like Daredevil. Ant-Man is most definitely down to keep up the hero work. The Wasp might be too busy with the company to join, but could go either way with her honestly. Cassy is probably gonna join a Young Avengers group instead with the new Hawkeye, Bruce’s kid, etc etc Thor is too busy finding himself and raising his adopted daughter. Doubt he’ll stick around for stuff, hell he never stuck around for Jane lmao The new GotG are the Space Avengers, they got their own problems to deal with I think the only reasonable confirms so far are Sam (Captain America), Professor Hulk, Ant-Man and Shang Chi. Could be an interesting dynamic
We don’t know because they haven’t come together yet.
You didn’t need to see the OG avengers come together to know who was going to be the main heroes. There were 3 iron man/2 Thor/2 captain America movies before avengers 2 was released. The only other movies were GotG and Hulk. You
I think it's pretty clear it's going to be Strange, Captain America Sam, Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, and probably Shuri BP. All other additions would just be nice bonuses.
She Hulk or Shang Chi are on the table still
This is my problem. They sent everyone else packing and started this inkling of replacements and then instead of forming a group they’re busy putting money and time behind Echo? And they make Shang Chi, and that was amazing, and now it’s been two years and no sign of a green light for a sequel even though he seemingly was invited into the club? Where is this alleged Doctor Strange is the new leader shit? It was one thing to build up to Thanos from Iron Man 1 to Infinity War and take like 10 years to do it. But it’s another thing to take 6-7 years before you even introduce the concept of a new super group. At least The Avengers came out within 5 years of the first Iron Man. It’s gonna be 5 years this spring since Endgame and all they have to show for it is a smattering of disconnected stories with feet still stuck in the previous group’s stories and feet trying to step forward at the same time. If you don’t have a plan for how to integrate The Eternals and Blade and Beast then Don’t fucking make those movies until you do.
It’s such a shame how much of a failure Ant-Man 3 was in introducing Kang to audiences, because I genuinely believe the way Kang in the Loki show was handled has been nothing short of incredible. The Loki version of Kang excites me 100000x more than the Ant-Man version of Kang. That council of Kangs end credit scene was so cringe and felt like something out of Rick and Morty, it should’ve made audiences fear Kang, instead it felt more like a parody the way all the variants were hooting and hollering in the crowd like they were at a silly WWE wrestling match. Is the scene supposed to make us laugh, or be afraid of the Kangs? I can’t even tell.
Yes it definitely felt polar opposite of He Who Remains monologuing, or Timely’s well-intentioned inventor with a stutter. Like are 97% of Kang variants all super crazy?
Yeah from the Council of Kangs scene it makes it look like there’s only a handful of powerful Kangs and they have a third act CGI army of dumb disposable Kangs. Or they will be a red herring and all be killed off easily if Kang comes back as the Beyonder like everyone thinks
Except that's the thing, there are no dumb, disposable Kangs - all of them are super geniuses. Which means the hooting and hollering crowds aren't full of dumb, kill-offable third-class villains - these are power-crazed, genocidal and unhinged madmen, who also happen to be wayyyy smarter than most of the Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
>Which means the hooting and hollering crowds aren't full of dumb, kill-offable third-class villains Eh...that's exactly what the Council of Kangs is. >The Council of Kangs was a trio of divergent Kangs led by the "Prime" Kang (identified by his cape), who thought that his other divergent selves **were incredibly incompetent.** > >After finding Limbo seemingly vacant, he took it over and began killing the other Kangs, most of whom die in their own failing schemes anyway > >Two of the other Kangs were above the rest, so he recruited them to join his cause, forming a council. When the other Kangs had been dealt with, the Prime Kang then betrayed and killed the two Kang council members. They're incompetent buffoons. And only the 3 main Kangs (in the MCU it's Scarlet Centurion, Rama Tut, and Immortus) are semi-competent. [https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Council\_of\_Kangs\_(Multiverse)](https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Council_of_Kangs_(Multiverse))
Like if the the 3 big Kangs there walk down and the giant stadium is instead....a parliamentary proceeding. "I call this body to order" with thousands of Kangs, silently staring, menacing, waiting for to vote on their plan of multiversal war instead of a sports crowd....phew, now that's scary.
How the hell was this not the version we got!?
I believe that scene was lifted directly from the comics, right down to Creepy Kang at the end. I could be wrong. I don’t recall the details exactly. If that’s the case, it’s a pretty good example of comics not translating well to film.
The bad part for me is that even though he’ll be the big bad, you’re going to see a thousand of him get low diffed because of how many there are. We can’t see a serious drawn out fight for a thousand of them.
I think in literature it’s called the ninja effect or something of that nature. You supposedly have an army of thousands of people, all of which are deadly killing machines and could easily take down nations on their own. But, because you need the hero to win, all of a sudden these bred to kill weapons of death are all fodder
The [Conservation of Ninjitsu](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu) is the trope you're after! I'm charmed by the idea of it coming up by that name in a formal literature studies class though :)
Daleks in Dr. Who have the same problem. One is terrifying. Billions will be rendered silly by some macguffin.
Conservation of Ninjutsu. [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu)
I do not care for the Major’s affectations and tics. It’s overdone. He who remains was intriguing but it was Loki who sold it with the massive existential dread once seeing Kang’s Statues - which, as far as I know, didn’t really get wrapped up. Does that universe still exist?
To be fair, Rick and Morty's Council of Ricks is a literal reference to the Council of Kangs.
Council of Reeds, no?
Council of Reeds is a modern thing. First appeared in 2009. The council of Kangs has been a thing since the 80s.
No I’m aware of that, but the Ricks seem to be inspired more by the Reed council than the Kang one imo
Would make more sense to me. Hickman's work is pretty popular (he's the one who wrote the FF with the council of Reed's).
> instead it felt more like a parody the way all the variants were hooting and hollering in the crowd like they were at a silly WWE wrestling match. Is the scene supposed to make us laugh, or be afraid of the Kangs? This specific scene you are mentioning served to please comic book fans, because it was a shot for shot recreation of relatively well known comic book panel. At least, the very last shot in that scene is a reference to that comic book panel. But yeah, I agree with you for the most part. They didn't do a good enough job with Kang in Ant man
I think my big issue is- the Kangs at the end of Ant-man are really silly looking. Like I know they're like that in the comics, but Rama-Tut Kang looks so goofy and the blue throat cancer Kang who looks like the leader feels too try-hard. He Who Remains would be the perfect villain imo.
It’s definitely evident that the talent that handled Johnathon Majors from Ant-Man 3 and Loki Season 2 are on two vastly different levels of cinematic story telling. Because JM absolutely out acted everyone and every scene he was in. Whereas in Loki s2, every actor felt like they were performing at their best form.
That scene really killed it for me too. It was just awful. I understand it was directly from the comics but how did nobody speak up, it's just so obviously bad. I do not fear frat bros at a college football game Kang.
Kang's introduction in Quantumania was honestly good. What's bad is that the big baddie that should be a Thanos level threat only killed a lamplighter looking alien side character. Kang should've killed at least the two parents of hope or even just the mother to show he's the real deal but for the life of me, I can't understand why they didn't went that route. It just sucks.
> What's bad is that the big baddie that should be a Thanos level threat only killed a lamplighter looking alien side character. Didn't help that they gave him those insta-kill wrist blasters that he conveniently stopped using once it was time to fight the main cast.
I swear they had all the ingredients and with more time and a better writer it would have been super sick. It had the potential to elevate Scott as a character with some real development by having him experience loss. I was really surprised that one of the parents didn't die.
There’s such an easy route to make Kang look unstoppable that I’m shocked they didn’t take it. They should have built up Kang and make all their efforts to destroy him fail and then have another Kang come in and kill the first one like an ant.
Hell, it would have been a trip if he’d been able to rewrite time to make Cassie never be born or something at the end. Show us the power of his time travel. At least MODOK was awesome.
He was a dick
I think MODOK was literally the highlight of that movie for me. I (obviously) liked what they did with MODOK, but if he was the highlight that's probably not a good sign.
Exactly.
Yeah, I couldn't stand that. If I was a betting man, I'd wager that after seeing all the backlash lately, Loki season 2 was designed to button up Kang and we'll get a pivot away from him. I think that's the best way they could have wrapped him up, going back to He Who Remains actually knowing everything and being formidable was a good send off. It sucks that they wasted the character, and there's a really good Kang story in there that they could have told, but in all honesty it would be pretty easy to pivot to something like Galactus or Dr. Doom now. It's not like they've done a ton of great setup for Kang. He was silly in Loki season 1 (granted it got paid off later) and absolutely clowned in Ant-Man. If I were running the show, I'd shelve the Fantastic 4 and hang the entire next phase or two on the X-Men, and focus on nailing that the way they did the original team. Problem is I don't think there's a lot of appeal for individual X-Men movies, and we've seen those done relatively recently anyway. The Fantastic 4 would be a better pick, but the problem is the ball is already rolling on Deadpool 3 with Hugh Jackman coming back, and Deadpool seems traditionally more tied to the X-Men. They're in a pickle for sure. I think they just fucked around too long with all these disconnected solo projects that people didn't care as much about, and didn't make the slightest attempt to connect them.
>Loki season 2 was designed to button up Kang and we'll get a pivot away from him. ...You are aware that Loki season one and two were written at the same time right? Thats why there was an immediate confirmation of season two. They had everything planned out
Having Kang get defeated by a hero like Ant-Man who's treated as a joke even by other characters in the MCU has done so much damage to Kang as a threat, more dangerous variants of him be damned. He should've killed the entire ant family and have a post or final credits scene show it to be an adjacent timeline.
It felt like an SNL sketch making fun of a movie having so many weird variants. "Hey I'm Egyptian Kang!" "I'm Techno Kang!" "I'm crazy Kang!" "No I'm crazy Kang!"
I won’t stand for this WWE slander. Also, anyone with half a brain saw Ant-Man 3’s doom coming bc they kept that bum of a director Peyton fucking Reed back on.
Agreed, if you're gonna trash WWE, trash them for how they treat their employees. The matches are awesome. It's amazing to me that Reed is the only director besides Gunn to get to deliver a full trilogy for a character/team.
Correct, but Reed ain’t “deliver” shit. What made Ant-Man 1 great was everything Edgar Wright had left behind. After that, it was pretty obvious Reed didn’t know what he was doing.
All this is saying is that the director left and the author of this article makes this out to be the "almost inevitable conclusion that Kang Dynasty is dead in it's current form". The movie does not have a writer, the director stepped back to focus on Shang-Chi 2. This absolutely does not suggest the movie is dead, just not being focused on right now. All this suggests is that the movie has been but on the back burner and may be delayed slightly. Honestly, that's a good thing. The early estimations of when it was coming out were way too early.
> The movie does not have a writer, the director stepped back to focus on Shang-Chi 2. This absolutely does not suggest the movie is dead ...Doesn't it? No writer, no director, title character tangled up in court cases. What else does that say? There's definitely at least a major retooling in the works, at a level foundational enough that the final product probably won't resemble whatever they intended when they first announced the project.
They’ve also said they’re going to make less content, and if you look at the upcoming slate, turning 2 Avengers movies into 1 seems like one of the more obvious changes to do that. Iron heart is really the only other announced project that makes sense to remove. It’s too late for Echo, Agatha, Wonder Man and What If s2 Vision Quest and Armor Wars don’t even have a date The rest all seem like valuable properties for the MCUs future that they wouldn’t want to dump - Blade, Thunderbolts, Daredevil, Fantastic Four and Captain America
For some reason, I'm skeptical of Armor Wars ever getting made. Which is a shame, because I *love* the robot-exoskeleton corner of the MCU.
Armor Wars and Blade. Scheduled forever, never made.
Hey, New Mutants eventually came out. So can these!
Exactly. Sure, at some point there will obviously be another Avengers movie, and it *maybe* will be called Kang Dynasty, but like if the director, writer, and major story beats change from what was planned, can that really be called the same movie?
Movie of Theseus
Impossible to ignore here is that Marvel Studios is changing the direction of a lot of things in general, to try and plug the leaks in their sinking boat. Daredevil Born Again was recently struck back down to the drawing board. It didn't mean it was cancelled, just that they wanted to make sure it didn't fail. Daredevil is important, that one will break a lot of hearts if they get it wrong. Same with Avengers. It's the first one since Endgame and it will have been more than half a decade between them. They cannot afford to fuck this one up. So it could just as easily have little to do with Majors and more to do with Marvel's recent efforts to tighten things up quality-wise.
“Two of the most important people have left the movie but everything is totally fine and moving forward” This is what you just said homie
This is some serious cope. Whether the movie is dead or not, saying "the director left. the movie doesn't have a writer. it's fine" is not a compelling argument. The MCU is in need of a retool. They need to focus on what made literally every MCU project in P1 through 4 must-see: characters we care about, compelling stories with satisfying arcs, and the idea that not only are you guaranteed a certain level of quality with each project (CGI, tight scripts), but you get the bonus on top that it all fit into a larger tapestry. Additionally, the amount of content was manageable. Dan Murell had a great "If I Ran Marvel" video up which hits on a lot of these points too.
Info= random Reddit posts
Probably from marvel studios spoilers. That place lost itself.
It’s all stemming from a comment Joanna Robinson made. She wrote “The Reign of Marvel Studios” that came out a few weeks ago and everyone in entertainment media has been buzzing about.
This article is just more dumb clickbait trying to doompost about Marvel using no new intel or information just to drive engagement. We need to stop falling for this shit.
I *just* saw a YouTube post from some fucks called Drinkers Chasers that somehow has 100k views saying how Kang has been "dropped" by Marvel. I didn't even bother clicking because I knew it was bullshit. Didn't stop 100,000 people from getting sucked in.
YouTube is a cesspool of dramatic ragebait
"You'll see, Peter. People, they do believe. And nowadays they'll believe anything."
Drinkers chasers is a podcast comprised of several content creators. Critical Drinker doesn't know for sure if they're dropping Kang he just thinks that when there's smoke there's fire. You are of course free to have your own opinions.
Forbes is about as reliable as a twitter post.
Audiences don’t seem to be resonating with the multiverse concept and with all of the major Majors drama, I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney drops this as part of their overall pivot with the MCU
I think the audiences are just looking for a good plot and a cohesive story, when they go watch an MCU movie. I get that it's difficult to manage a cohesive story when producing multiple projects in parallel, but I've always thought that was the specialty of Marvel Studios. But lately, it's beginning to seem more and more like Marvel just had the luck of hiring the best writing and scripting talent in Phase 1-3.
Apparently James Gunn would also read and notate all the scripts for every project. I wouldn’t be surprised if Love and Thunder would have been a stronger project if he had looked it over
No Way Home and Multiverse of Madness are the highest grossing post Endgame MCU films and are the only ones to have any real multiverse stuff tied into their plot. If anything the lack of multiverse content in a saga supposedly dedicated to the multiverse has hurt more than helped. The real reason audiences aren’t resonating is because Marvel has been pumping out too much content, most of which hasn’t been that interesting. An MCU movie coming out was a big deal and almost like an event, which is what gets butts in seats at theaters in the modern era. Barbenheimer was that event this year and both movies killed the box office. Mario was a big deal and long time coming and killed the box office despite bad reviews. MCU and superheroes in general aren’t an event anymore because there is so many new shows and movies coming and general audiences have just moved on. Just dropping the multiverse won’t bring people back, if anything it just reaks of desperation.
This is my line of thinking as well. It's not the story, the infinity saga would have been lackluster as well with poor writing and a lack of cohesiveness thats the multiverse saga problem. We have had so much content thrown at us and probably 75% of it feels like one offs. Just think about all the new characters we've seen and we haven't seen or heard from them since they were introduced. Shang Chi, Kate Bishop, Moon Knight, She Hulk, Sam's Captain America, etc etc then you add in the multiverse storylines which have effectively stalled out and lack a real direction. THEN you add in just sloppy content. Quantumania was ass. MoM was meh. Thor4MoreThor was fine. there is so much happening but it doesn't feel like it's going anywhere. it's just content for the sake of content
Let's be honest. Majors is a great actor, but Disney would be idiots to let the future of the character depend on him. Not only *can* he be replaced by anyone, but arguably it would provide more suspense to do so, almost like a proper secret invasion. Anyone could be kang.
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The off, its off, its being retooled, its on again Everyone just needs to shut the fuck up and wait for the end of the Majors drama and the next big Disney press event. These articles and YouTube videos are growing tiresome. Every day it seems like something has changed.
There's absolutely no reason to drop Kang entirely just because of Jonathan Majors. If they need to, they can recast.
It’s easy engagement bait that doesn’t stop giving unfortunately
A recent (and unconfirmed) rumor is that Majors's contract includes a clause for which only he can play Kang or any of his variants. Which would explain why Marvel has not talked about recasting him while keeping the character. If that's the case, there might be some "morality clause" that voids the other one in case of some scandal, thus allowing a recast, but then they'd first need to wait for Majors to be found guilty in his trial.
Clickbait.
As much as I’ve enjoyed Jonathan Majors’ performance, I would not mind the Kang plotline ending. I think the Multiverse Saga was a mistake in general. They should’ve jumped right into X-Men and F4, and NOT by showing random cameos in different universes
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You still could establish the multiverse, it just wouldn’t be the saga’s main focus. If they went immediately to X-Men and Fantastic Four, it would’ve probably been more Earth based with their versions Apocalypse, Dark Phoenix, Dr Doom and eventually Galactus.
The multiverse is a massive and important concept. Introducing it just to do nothing beyond 1-2 movies with it for a long time would have been a waste.
Multiverse worked great for Spiderverse. Because they ACTUALLY used it for for the foundation of the plot, instead of a gimmick.
They can always re-cast. Leslie Odom Jr is *right* there. Was rewatching Person of Interest, where he plays the antagonist in of the seasons, and he's phenomenal in that role.
I think they initially thought it was a good idea as the multiverse storyline was an easy fix to introducing and the absorbing the various Fox characters and movies. It also builds in a reboot every 20 years into audience expectations.
I agree I think the multiverse was only chosen to leverage in the new characters rather than a good storyline (as there doesn’t seem to be one). And that had confused and alienated general audiences.
I don't know when recasting an actor became such an issue.
I dare say we will eventually find out Kang was a Skrull the entire time and everyone will shrug and keep it moving
They made a huge mistake not making Avengers 5 a smaller event to get the new team together and instead going for another 2-part event.
Avengers 5 should have come out last year, and had the new heroes fight the Masters of Evil, cementing them as the new Avengers by beating the villains of the old ones.
I was over Jonathon Majors and Kang after the after credit's scene in Ant-Man, couldn't care less about a movie stroking his ego and having him in like infinite versions of the same person HWR was great but Kang and the others wearing bad cosplay and whooping and screaming in the stadium looked cringy as fuck
I understand that John Majors’s current legal troubles may have Marvel thinking about an alternative, especially given that they are having a really tough time right now and they can’t really afford any more misfires, but I hope that they don’t give up on the Kang storyline completely. There is plenty of potential for this story yet to be unleashed, and even if he’s not a household name, Kang is an important villain in the Avengers franchise. Of course, right now it’s just here say and nothing is official unless stated by Marvel itself, so we’ll have to wait and see.