Obviously, the Season 1 finale of Loki has already confirmed Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror to be the next end-of-level boss for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s roster of superheroes, but the actor’s brief outing in the conclusion to the Disney Plus show’s first run indicated that we could be getting a big bad completely different, and perhaps ultimately better, than Thanos.
Avengers: Infinity War may have changed audience perception by having a CGI-assisted Josh Brolin take center stage in the narrative and ultimately accomplish his goals, but the Mad Titan kind of sucked up until that point. We were supposed to treat him as the ultimate threat to the MCU, when all he really did was show up here and there, floating in his space chair and having his lackeys do most of the work.
Majors’ Kang was confirmed for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania a long time ago, but we’re hearing from our sources – the same ones who told us Captain America 4 with Anthony Mackie was in the works long before it was confirmed – that He Who Remains will be replicating the Thanos formula to a certain extent, by showing up all across the franchise in a number of projects.
Perhaps the most exciting thing is that He Who Remains was killed right off the bat, but not before he teased that a number of much more dangerous variants of his were on their way to the multiverse. Realistically, that means we could be seeing Majors give a completely different performance each time he appears as a new version of Kang the Conqueror, instead of repeating the Thanos approach of dry, exposition-laced cameos and little else.
