Marvel may have just given us a terrifying vision of what a Jonathan Majors-shaped mess the Multiverse Saga is aiming for

Appropriately for a story about Kang, it’s really hard to know where to begin. Maybe we’ll go with the MCU? Yeah, that sort of makes sense.

The MCU has been in a real pickle lately, accidentally turning its infinite growth model into an inadvertent microbiome of the whoopsie-doodles of capitalism in general. Worse than that, the shared universe just couldn’t seem to find any traction during Phase Four. Highly anticipated stories and character introductions seemed to end uniformly in either disappointment or dragged with cliffhangers promising future disappointment. 

Then along came Jonathan Majors, the undeniably talented and not yet legally untangled up-and-coming performer with the acting chops to bring a complicated character to life. Erring on the side of ambition, Marvel cast the Lovecraft Country star as Kang the Conqueror, a multi-faceted time-traveling villain/hero/villain again with six decades’ worth of history in the comics. The promise made at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was a direct one: Untold thousands of multiversal Kang variants were on their way to the MCU, ready to dominate and destroy. Rumors made the rounds that Kang’s story would end with a hard reboot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Reactions were mixed.

In 2023, Marvel Comics gave its readers an inside look at what the alleged future of the MCU might look like with the event comic Ultimate Invasion, a story that’s heavy on Kang and ends with a universe being rebooted, and friends? It’s a rat nest. Even a brief synopsis of it would require a 3D chessboard, a Powerpoint slideshow, and one of those Pepe Sylvia red yarn cork boards to describe with any efficacy. We’ll try to just do it with words anyway.

Get ready to feel tired with Ultimate Invasion

At the tail end of Ultimate Invasion, a variant of Kang gets set loose on two variants of Reed Richards by a variant of Iron Man. That Kang is defeated. Then a young variant of Tony Stark decides to become a different variant of Kang called Iron Lad, dressed as yet another variant of Kang called Silver Centurion. Then he sets out to restart a damaged universe created by one of the Reed Richards variants by setting up a pile of superhero origin stories, rebooting a universe with the potential for new reimaginings of familiar stories.

It’s a time loop, except when it isn’t, unless it turns out that it is. The short version: Basically, we should’ve known that series writer Jonathan Hickman was a mixed bag after Dawn of X became the first comic book in history to make everyone who read it motion sick, and also that Kang might not be the Last Great Hope that the MCU was hoping for after all.

If Ultimate Invasion serves as an outline for what’s to come in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and the rumors sure make it sound like that’s the case — Phase Five might be more like Phase Four than anyone is comfortable imagining. Maybe a reboot is just what this universe needs. It worked for Spider-Man, didn’t it? It is the only way the MCU can pretend that Phase Four and already-set-on-the-path-of-disaster Phase Five didn’t happen.