Jonathan Majors has been dropped by Marvel from his role as Kang, following his conviction yesterday.
On the 18th of December, Jonathan Majors was convicted of two misdemeanor counts of assault against his ex-girlfriend. It’s a horrible situation for the victim and you can read the details elsewhere.
It feels wrong to even consider something as comparatively trivial as where this leaves a film franchise under the circumstances, but nevertheless Marvel’s response was immediate (via Variety).
Majors has been dropped from all future MCU projects, effective immediately.
Jonathan Majors was cast as Kang the Conqueror, the MCU’s next big bad after Thanos. He had already made his first appearance as the multiverse hopping villain in the first season finale of Loki, followed by a major role in this year’s Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania.
He was then going to headline The Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, which was due to begin filming early 2024.
Since his arrest in March, Majors had been dropped by his agent and Magazine Dreams, a bodybuilding drama written and directed by Elijah Bynum in which he plays the lead and was set to be a strong awards contender, was dropped from the release schedule by Disney.
The main decision facing Kevin Feige is whether to recast Kang, or scrap the character entirely, which given the interconnectedness of the MCU, would be extremely expensive.
It comes as the latest of many setbacks for The Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, which had so far seen director Destin Daniel Cretton exit the project, as did writer Jeff Loveness, due to the plans reportedly in the works to move away from the Kang story arc due to Majors’ legal troubles.
The most recent update was that Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness writer Michael Waldron had been hired to rewrite the screenplay. Waldron was already confirmed as the writer of the following film Avengers: Secret Wars.
More on this as we get it.
