Kang the Conqueror Would’ve Fought the Avengers This Weekend

The month of May is typically an important time for Marvel’s Avengers movies: the original movie came out May 4, 2012, and Age of Ultron May 1, 2015. Once upon a timeline, instead of the adjacent Thunderbolts, this weekend would’ve marked the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’ first theatrical reappearance since Endgame.

During its SDCC panel on July 23, 2022, Marvel Studios announced Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars would respectively release May 2 and November 7, 2025. The duology was to be the epic closer to the Multiverse Saga—begun in Phase Four with 2021’s Black Widow, and which now spread across several TV shows, in addition to films.

It was that summer’s Loki which truly kicked off the whole “multiverse” part of this, and its first season concluded with the reveal of this saga’s big bad: Kang the Conqueror, played by then-rising actor Jonathan Majors. While the multiverse focus continued via What If…? and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Majors wouldn’t actually appear as Kang in the films until 2023’s Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania. And that’s where things took an unfortunately dark turn in real life.

Just announced in Hall H:

Marvel Studios’ Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, in theaters May 2, 2025. #SDCC2022 pic.twitter.com/kCxeyYwgN5

— Marvel Studios* (@MarvelStudios) July 24, 2022

On March 25, 2023, weeks after the releases of the Majors-starring Quantumania and Creed III, the actor was arrested for assaulting his then-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari. The news, and subsequent reports from outlets like the Rolling Stone over Majors’ allegedly abusive behavior toward previous girlfriends and colleagues, led to Majors being dropped by his management company and PR firm, and his U.S. Army and Texas Rangers ads being pulled. Magazine Dreams, his bodybuilding drama picked up by Disney’s Fox Searchlight subsidiary as a potential Oscars frontrunner, was also dropped and left in limbo for two years until it was picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment and released this past March.

Amid the initial allegations and trial playing out, Marvel didn’t speak much about Majors, who by that point only had already completed filming on Loki’s second season. Hours after he was found guilty of assaulting Jabbari, Marvel officially parted ways with the actor, later retitling Kang Dynasty—which was then to be directed by Shang-Chi’s Daniel Destin Cretton—into Doomsday, with the big villain role now filled by a returning Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom. Once Downey and the new title were revealed, the writing was on the wall: Kang was done, and now Marvel could play around with the heaviest of villainous heavy hitters.

It really can’t be said enough how hard Marvel was pushing Kang at the time. Not only was he the star of two Timeless one-shots teasing various comic events happening in 2022 and 2023, the villain’s been a recurring player in Jed Mackay and CF Villa’s Avengers book. Quantumania’s marketing teased the film as the start of a “new dynasty,” and it ended with a legion of Kangs gathered together and hollering in joy at the chaos they were about to wreak. The company was all-in on the villain to lead its multiverse push, and in the end, those plans were thoroughly dismantled by something completely out of its control.

Unlike Thanos, whose pre-Avengers: Infinity War appearances were two brief post-credits scenes, Kang was more prominent in the Multiverse Saga in a way that meant pivoting away from him would be equal parts awkward and hilarious. In retrospect, the villain was not being set up to come off as a legitimate threat to anyone, really: in each of his appearances, Kang or a variant of him dies after being hyped up (often by himself) as a mighty force the others are powerless to stop. In reality, he gets done in by a knife, ants, Pym particles, and multiple instances of spaghettification, not to mention his other counterparts being handled offscreen by the Time Variance Authority. According to Loki’s executive producer Kevin R. Wright, Majors’ allegations weren’t a factor into how things ultimately shook out with his character(s), so it’s hard to know if Kang was ever going to get a true W in his titular film, or how his story would’ve been furthered in Secret Wars.

Like the Inhumans before him, it’s doubtful Kang will make a return to the MCU any time soon, or at least not until years from now. With Majors’ history hovering over the role and the character not adding up to much altogether, his brief time here is a capper to an era that Marvel is all too happy to move on from. For anyone lamenting what could’ve been, there’s always Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.