There was a time when the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe centered around a villain that, despite being less physically imposing as the Mad Titan, was poised to be far more dangerous than Thanos ever was. That villain was Kang the Conqueror and after Avengers: Endgame, all roads seemed to be leading to the multiversal threat. The first season of Loki gave us our first glimpse of where things were going with Jonathan Majors’ appearance as He Who Remains and then in the second season where he appeared as multiple variants of Kang the Conqueror and, notably Victor Timely. But the real “oh crap” moment that really solidified Kang’s importance to the future of the MCU was when Marvel announced Avengers: The Kang Dynasty at SDCC 2022 and followed that up with Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania to set the stage.
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Everything changed in 2023 following Majors’ legal issues and firing and instead of recasting Kang, Marvel made a hard pivot. The MCU moved away from the threat of Kang and Doctor Doom became the next major threat and now, we’re just a few months away from Avengers: Doomsday hitting theaters. Time moves on. However, Kang recently made a surprising return thanks to the second season of X-Men ’97 and while it’s great to see the villain back, it’s only serving to confirm that Marvel made a big mistake with how they handled the Multiverse Saga.
Marvel Should Have Just Recast Kang (And It Wouldn’t Have Been That Hard)
Just so we are all on the same page here about Kang’s return, here’s a quick overview if you haven’t quite gotten caught up on the new season of X-Men ’97 (so, warning, spoilers.) The second episode shows us how En Sabah Nur became Apocalypse and, echoing the comics, that journey is influenced by a major Marvel villain, Rama-Tut, aka a variant of Kang the Conqueror. In this X-Men ’97 timeline, En Sabah Nur vows revenge on the despotic Rama-Tut and that sets him on a collision course with the villain. It gives the X-Men ’97 universe a version of Kang that basically creates Apocalypse.
While it’s easy enough to just write that off as being its own pocket of things, when you look at the significance of it as well as where the MCU was going, you really get a sense that Marvel was cooking with their Kang plans. The mid-credits scene of Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania gave us a brief appearance of Rama-Tut as one of the three leaders of the Council of Kangs (the other two being Immortus and Centurion). We have no way of knowing where things would ultimately go, but Marvel’s mid-credits scenes are designed to be built upon. That was going somewhere and where it was going was not gonna be good for the heroes. There’s also that little bit at the end of the movie before we even get to the credits scenes where Scott Lang is very unsettled thinking about Kang’s death being the start of something really, really bad.
That’s called foreshadowing, kids, and fans were into it. Everyone had a theory about Kang. Everyone had their own idea about how bad the Council of Kang’s were gonna mess up the MCU. We were ready for some multiverse mayhem. And then it was gone with Majors’ being fired. It would have been very simple to not lose the momentum and excitement of Kang by simply recasting Majors. It’s honestly still baffling why Marvel didn’t do that. For starters, it’s not like Majors had been playing Kang all that long. Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania was his most substantive role to date in the overall MCU and since they’d already killed him off, there was a perfect opening to cast someone new and just explain it away as a quirk of the multiverse. It’s not like every multiversal variant of someone is identical—Loki established that with the different types of Lokis. They could have just got a new actor for the role and moved forward with the plans for the multiverse and Kang. And let’s be honest: Marvel’s recast characters before. It could have been done.
Instead, they opted to throw out several projects worth of world building, foreshadowing, and table setting and drop in the idea of Doctor Doom. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Doom can’t be an effective villain or a good story. But given how fast the switch up has been and the fact that we’ve had almost no story build up to Doom being an actual threat to anyone—not to mention that they’ve opted to make Robert Downey Jr. the villain after he had such an indelible run as Iron Man, it feels like not only did Marvel tear up all the work they’d done creating an intricate and engaging multiverse saga that could have been truly intense but now they’re about to hard launch a villain no one is actually invested in. Sure, Avengers: Doomsday has hype and we’re excited, but how much of that hype is about RDJ’s return and the seeming clown car of returning actors and not the story itself? Time will tell, but seeing Rama-Tut in X-Men ’97 feels like a confirmation that Marvel messed up when it comes to tossing out the Multiverse Saga centered around Kang. There was so much potential there and now, we’ll never see it.
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