This weekend, Marvel Studios kicked off the FIFTH phase of their ongoing cinematic universe with Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. The box office results were perfectly fine. Audiences seemed to enjoy themselves. Critics were pretty unimpressed. Such has been the case for just about every film from Marvel Studios since they reached the pop cultural summit of Avengers: Endgame.
This MCU malaise has prompted countless discussions about what’s wrong with Marvel and what they can do to fix it, and as a devoted fan of this franchise I’ve participated in plenty of these discussions, on both sides of the issue. Am I still enjoying these movies? Sure! Do I also think they’ve lost their way? It’s hard to argue otherwise.
In the months leading up to Quantumania, however, a glimmer of hope has appeared, a beacon of light in the darkness that the MCU has been wandering through for the past three years. Marvel announced that Jonathan Majors, the unbelievably charismatic actor who burst onto the scene in 2020 with Da 5 Bloods and Lovecraft Country, would be playing the time-traveling Kang the Conqueror, the MCU’s next major villain. Perhaps this would give the MCU the urgency and the high stakes it’s been missing since the days of Thanos.
I saw Quantumania this weekend and while I like Paul Rudd as much as the next guy, I was really there to see Majors in his first major appearance as Kang (he showed up briefly in 2021’s Loki series). While the movie around him was mostly more of the same from the MCU, I think it’s clear that Majors is every bit the superstar Marvel was hoping he would be. He’s the kind of star that these movies have to be built around.
Ultimately, the MCU became the Goliath of Hollywood not through groundbreaking special effects or visual artistry, but through good old fashioned star power and great actors playing memorable characters. Quantumania gives us a glimpse not only at Majors’ menacing, verging-on-campy interpretation of Kang, but also a sneak peek at the enormous range he’s going to be allowed to explore with this character in the years to come.
Perhaps most interesting of all is what Kang represents as a villain. With Thanos, Marvel explored the idea of how terrifying someone can be when they believe they’re doing horrible things for a noble goal, an idea that I think resonated with a lot of Americans in the 2010s. Kang’s threat is very different and might sound pretty familiar to fans of Marvel and of pop culture in general. Kang’s goal is ultimately to remove any possibilities from the universe that don’t fit his preferred narrative. Ironically, this may remind you of Marvel Studios itself, declaring TV shows and movies fans once loved as “non-canon” and irrelevant now that they don’t fit neatly in to the MCU.
But the threat represented by Kang certainly applies more broadly to American culture as a whole right now. Don’t like a movie or TV show because it doesn’t specifically cater to you? Review-bomb it online or start a social campaign against it. Don’t agree with some of the books your kids are reading in school? Have them pulled from the library shelves. Silencing other viewpoints, particularly those that do not actively threaten harm against anyone, has become the tactic of choice for those whose ideas lose out, those who can’t control the narrative of the universe we happen to live in.
Will Kang finally give the MCU a unifying idea to build around again? That falls to Majors, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige and the team writing and directing the roughly eleventy-billion movies and TV shows coming out between now and Avengers: Kang Dynasty. I’m rooting for them.