Where Does Marvel Go From Here?
Mia Morrison Marvel is at an impasse. Streaming viewership of its TV shows is down, The Marvels opened to a third of its predecessor movie’s box office take, and the release schedule of the studio’s upcoming film projects is more uncertain than ever. The MCU has hitched its wagon to a sprawling multiverse road map that’s failing to captivate general audiences, and now, that multiverse is without its villain. On Monday, shortly after Kang the Conqueror actor Jonathan Majors was convicted on assault charges, Marvel and Disney announced they would be dropping Majors from the franchise.
Kang is currently involved in several of the MCU’s TV and film subplots, from 2023’s Loki and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to the studio’s yet-to-be-released team-up movies titled Avengers: The Kang Dynasty (currently slated for 2026, though sources inside Marvel told The Hollywood Reporter the studio is working on a new, retitled script) and Avengers: Secret Wars (named for a multiverse-centric comic event and arriving in 2027). Alternate plans for Marvel’s future had been floated before Majors’s conviction — for example, Fantastic Four villain Doctor Doom is rumored to be in contention to replace Kang as the MCU’s primary bad guy. But no path forward will be forged without complications. Here are the four that seem most plausible:
1) Marvel stays the course.
This would be the most convenient option for Marvel storytellers, given that the multiverse is the key narrative device of the MCU’s fourth and (still ongoing) fifth “phases.” The Marvels ended with a tease for a dimension-hopping crossover. Loki’s second season concluded with the god of mischief assuming responsibility for the multiverse itself. The next big-screen Marvel project on the release calendar is Deadpool 3 and based on what little we know about the sequel — Hugh Jackman reprising the role of Wolverine, Fox’s Deadpool movies being folded into the MCU, and … Jennifer Garner returning as Elekra? — it seems it will continue the multiverse ploy to ensure gratuitous cameos from Marvel’s past in the vein of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Maintaining the multiverse framing would also provide Marvel with options for recasting Kang, rather than eliminating or downplaying his character. Of course the studio could go the traditional route of replacing Majors without explanation, like when Don Cheadle replaced Terrence Howard as Rhodey in Iron Man 2, or when Mark Ruffalo took up the Hulk mantle from Edward Norton in The Avengers. (Harrison Ford will also appear in Captain America: Brave New World as Thaddeus Ross, after the death of William Hurt.) And the theatrical disappointment of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania could actually work in the studio’s favor here — there are fewer viewers who would even notice the change. Then again, a lower box office take just means the franchise die hards make up a higher percentage of returning viewers, and they tend to be sticklers for consistency. Those viewers would be well aware of the various MCU versions of Kang, all of them played by Majors: the futuristic continuity-keeper “He Who Remains,” the affable 19th-century inventor Victor Timely, the Quantumania variant who commits more universal genocide than Thanos, not to mention the Council of Kangs.
If Marvel wants to keep lore-obsessives happy, then you can expect the multiverse to stick around, and for the studio to employ some explanation for why Kang might eventually show up with a different face — even if it’s just the butterfly effect of Deadpool’s time-meddling.
2) Marvel keeps the multiverse but hard-pivots from Kang.
Do we really need Kang? Not counting credit scenes, we’ve only experienced two villainous version of him — and they are either presumed dead (who knows what becomes of Kang in Quantumania when he gets sucked into the “multiversal engine core”) or are confirmed to be dead (as is the case for Loki’s He Who Remains). And one could argue neither left much of an impression on the MCU; Quantumania Kang doesn’t exactly seem super threatening now that we’ve seen him taken down by an army of ants. Could the franchise proceed as if Kang the Conqueror never existed at all? Loki seemed to hint at the possibility of Victor Timely (the one good Kang) never receiving the copy of the futuristic TVA guidebook that set him down his time-traveling path anyway.
It’s easy to write off the post-credit scene versions of Kang from there. The post-credit scene format itself feels increasingly prone to flashy character reveals that are decreasingly consequential to the MCU’s grander narrative. Take Morbius (please!), a pseudo-Marvel entry that sort of brought Michael Keaton’s Vulture into the Venom-verse through convoluted explanations. Or Venom himself being zapped into the MCU in the post-credits scene of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, thus setting up a Spider confrontation that’s yet to come to pass in the MCU. The aforementioned films are Sony productions, so perhaps different rules apply, but the laissez-faire approach to these teasers seems to have bled into the MCU, too. Doctor Strange gestured at Baron Mordo’s hunt for the world’s sorcerers in 2016, but its sequel only features an alternate variant of him. So when it comes to the Council of Kangs, could we simply ignore them? And just trust that the Time Variance Authority that is keeping an eye on the multiverse at the end of Loki’s second season has a handle on the Kangs?
In the end, the majority of Marvel Comics’ multiverse stories have unfolded without Kang’s involvement, including Secret Wars. Secret Wars was technically the title of two major comic events, the first published in 1984–85, and the second in 2015–16. In the ’80s series, an omnipotent being known as the Beyonder traps Earth’s major heroes and villains on a planet called Battleworld and forces them to, shockingly, battle. But by 2015, the Beyonder had been written out of Marvel continuity and replaced by a species of higher-dimensional aliens called the Beyonders who cause entire universes to collide with one another in various “incursions.” This was a handy way for Marvel Comics to combine its mainline “616” continuity with its “Ultimate” universe. It’s how Miles Morales and Peter Parker both ended up as Spider-Man, and it’s likely how the movies will bring over the likes of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four into the MCU. In both Secret Wars stories, Doctor Doom effectively stole the powers of the Beyonder/Beyonders.
There are other candidates for Marvel’s next Thanos, like the planet-devouring Galactus, the perpetually re-spawning Annihilus, the infinitely powerful Molecule Man (he also has a hand in the 2015 Secret Wars), and, of course, Dracula (assuming the Blade movie ever gets off the ground). But as things stand, if Marvel wants to keep multiversing its way through shows and sequels en route to Secret Wars, then introducing Doctor Doom as a primary antagonist, after swiftly closing the door on Kang, could be the way to go. And Marvel wouldn’t even need to wait until their Fantastic Four reboot in 2025 to introduce him. The Black Panther rules one secret kingdom; Namor rules another; who’s to say an Earth-bound team like the Thunderbolts won’t start beef with Doctor Doom’s Latveria?
3) Marvel keeps the multiverse and slowly moves away from Kang.
A better way to establish that Kang is not the biggest threat in the MCU might be to introduce a villain who dethrones him, which would involve phasing Kang out and slowly building to Doom’s reign. (Avengers: The Doom Dynasty has a nicer ring to it anyway.)
In the 2015 Secret Wars — which will likely be a more prominent influence on the films than the 1980s version — Doom smashes bits of remaining universes together to create his own version of Battleworld, a realm over which he rules as God Emperor Doom. If the MCU wants to replicate its Endgame success, then an initial Avengers entry in which the heroes lose (i.e., in which Doom weaves his Battleworld)could pave the wayfor characters from multiple continuities to team up and take him on. Captain Marvel, a resurrected Iron Man, Magneto, Howard the Duck, whatever floats your boat.
Sidelining Kang in the process may not even actually require Doom. Victor Timely has already proven that not all Kangs are bad, and Kang-on-Kang violence has featured prominently in the comics before. The seeds of this may have been unintentionally sown at the end of The Marvels, when Kamala Khan approaches Hawkeye’s Kate Bishop to form a junior Avengers team — the beginnings of the Young Avengers. In the comics, this group is led by Iron Lad, a teenage Kang who, after seeing what he becomes in the future, travels back in time to assemble a team capable of defeating his Conqueror variant. This way, Marvel gets to have its cake (retcon an unsuccessful villain) and eat it too (use the multiverse to bring together familiar faces that’ll put butts in seats).
4. Marvel abandons the multiverse.
But sometimes a clean break works best, and who’s to say a more streamlined series of events won’t help the MCU focus more on characters than timelines? Let’s say Marvel can’t finagle the contracts necessary for a multigenerational team-up (James McAvoy, Tobey Maguire, Robert Downey Jr.), or it finally exhausts its nostalgia-driven strategies like “bring back Bryan Singer’s X-Men” or “fan cast Jim from The Office.” Before crossovers and brand recognition were the studio’s bread, butter, and lingua franca, Marvel’s powers-that-be often mined the corners of comic continuity. Iron Man 3 took elements from the pages of Iron Man: Extremis. Captain America: The Winter Soldier borrowed from a comic of the same name. The Avengers was basically an adaptation of the group’s initial few comic appearances (with some of The Ultimates thrown in), and the broad outline of Thanos’s scheme matched his story in Infinity Gauntlet — though sadly, without his crush on Lady Death. There are more than enough pre-written stories and villains in the archives that Marvel doesn’t have to lock itself into the multiverse concept.
For example, a villain like Galactus needn’t be a one-and-done — and he needn’t be depicted as a giant cloud, either, the way he was in 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. With an envoy at his disposal (the aforementioned Surfer), you have a readymade minor villain who can set the stage for a final boss, the way Loki did for Thanos in The Avengers. This is pretty much how things played out in Silver Surfer’s and Galactus’s initial comic appearances, too, a 1966 arc called The Coming of Galactus. “Heroes gather to punch Big Monster” is certainly simpler than a multiverse, but this year’s biggest movie was about a children’s toy coming to life and it made a point of hand-waving its own sci-fi specifics, so maybe less convoluted is better.
But if complication is what you want, then you can just as easily pull off something like House of M, arguably the mid-2000s comic event that paved the way for all of modern Marvel. Long story short: Wanda Maximoff (who may or may not be dead in the movies) lost control of her powers and created an alternate universe where she and her father, Magneto, ruled the world, with mutants as a superior race and humans as an underclass. The specifics might be tough to replicate, but Wanda’s reality warping allows for something multiverse-esque without having to worry about keeping different timelines straight. In the comics, the event resulted in the near annihilation of all mutantkind, so it isn’t a stretch to imagine a movie version that causes their emergence instead, thus bringing the X-Men into the MCU.
This could also undo Monica Rambeau ending up in a different “reality” at the end of The Marvels without having to collide entire alternate universes (magic is always a fun quick fix for continuity questions). And with a reformed Loki now atop the throne of time, Marvel could just as easily proceed as though the problem of different realities crashing and fighting each other had already been resolved. Crisis — or secret war — averted.
Where Does Marvel Go From Here?
