Ever since the Infinity Saga ended, there’s been a ton of rumor and speculation about who could be established as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s next Avengers-level threat. The company themselves even leaned into it by polling fans on who they’d want to see as the next overarching big bad, but it looks as though the final episode of Loki‘s first season has already answered that question.
Thanos may have been the most powerful antagonist we’ve seen in the franchise to date, but at the end of the day he was still a power-hunger maniac hunting a series of MacGuffins to help him accomplish his goal, which is a pretty formulaic M.O. by the standards of the superhero genre. Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror looks to be something else altogether, even if we’ve only just met a single one of his variants.
Based on the mountains of exposition Majors was handed in Loki, now that Sylvie has essentially f*cked the Sacred Timeline, the MCU is now wide open to attack from a potentially limitless number of Kangs, not all of whom possess the relatively sunny disposition and easygoing nature of He Who Remains.
In a new interview, Loki creator and lead writer Michael Waldron teased the massive impact that Loki‘s surprise guest could end up having across the entirely of the Phase Four film and television slate.
“We knew that we wanted this show to be huge, and we wanted it to really end with a bang and have a huge impact on the MCU moving forward. Knowing that Kang was probably going to be the next big cross-movie villain, and because he is a time-traveling, multiversal adversary, it just always made so much sense. I came up with that big multiversal war mythology and pitched it out in the room one day to our producers. And they said, yeah, let’s go for it. We knew we were going to end up meeting the man behind the curtain. And then it was just on us to make sure that that meeting really delivered.”
Kevin Feige confirmed the Avengers would be assembling again in the future, and with things set to spiral out of control in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, it’s going to be all hands on deck when the onslaught of Kang variants begin to make their presence felt.
