Director Peyton Reed is sick and tired of being viewed as the brains behind a franchise deemed as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s smallest in more ways than one, and the introduction of Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania instantly certainly makes the upcoming threequel feel like an Avengers-level event.
Not only does Paul Rudd’s third solo outing as Scott Lang mark the official kickoff of Phase Five as the build towards The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars begins in earnest, but it’ll also give us our first taste of the newest big bad, one that’s already being hyped up as a threat considerably smarter, deadlier, and more dangerous than Thanos.
As you can infer from the name, Kang isn’t here to f*ck around, with the multiversal warlord hellbent on taking over each and every reality that comprises the grand calculus of the multiverse. However, MCU fans on Reddit have made a very salient point noting that multiple worlds have already been canonically conquered in the past by a vengeful demigod. Nine of them, to be precise.
Before becoming the stern-if-benevolent father of Thor and Loki, Anthony Hopkins’ Odin led his armies to victory on every single one of the Nine Realms, establishing himself as arguably the single most powerful non-Celestial figure in the 616 timeline’s pre-Thanos history by doing so.
Kang might be the most dangerous conqueror the MCU has ever seen, but he certainly isn’t the first, so maybe Chris Hemsworth’s God of Thunder will be forced to channel his old man’s past (which has rarely been mentioned out loud) in order to take the fight to a villain promising to accomplish the same feat on an even grander scale.
