Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is due in just eight days, looking all but ready to set the Marvel Cinematic Universe on a brand new trajectory; one akin to the palpable stakes we felt near the tail-end of Infinity Saga, and one where Jonathan Majors could very well assert himself as the new face of the MCU following Robert Downey Jr.’s departure.
Indeed, the few clips and trailers we’ve seen of Kang the Conqueror is every bit as enrapturing as we’d expect from an actor of Majors’ caliber, which was first utilized in the first season of Loki when he brought variant He Who Remains to life. Of course, the more whimsical nature of the creator of the Time Variance Authority will be nowhere to be found with Kang, who already has us fearing for the fate of Earth’s champions even more than we did when Thanos was still around.
As the premier villain of the Multiverse Saga, we can expect him to pose an unprecedented threat, one that we already assume will far surpass the one presented by Thanos. But just how is Kang going to mark himself as a next-level big bad?
In an interview with ScreenRant, Quantumania producer Stephen Broussard named the sheer unpredictability of Kang’s threat as the main fear factor, noting how the multiple variants will not only find many enemies in Earth’s champions, but also with each other.
“There was a singular-ness of Thanos that was frightening. But Kangs don’t even agree amongst themselves, which is what’s exciting to think about. The unpredictable nature of that feels like it’s a threat that is every bit as scary as Thanos, but not feeling like a retread to us.”
He also noted how the Kangs appear to exist in a “heightened state,” where they’ve grown to understand the multiverse in a way that greatly dwarfs human knowledge on the subject.
“They clearly exist in this heightened state. They’ve cracked the code of the multiverse. And humanity, as they say, is starting to scratch at the door of the multiverse. We’ve been protected. We’ve been sort of isolated in what I call our terrarium, which is the analogy we used in Loki season one. That door gets kicked down, and there’s a chaos that breeds into that; the chaos of possibility and the chaos of different things colliding together is really scary to me.”
By the sounds of it, we could very much be heading towards the possibility of Kang going toe-to-toe with himself, subsequently leaving the multiverse in ruin as a new reality, perhaps Battleworld, slides in to take its place. This is all just theory-crafting, but Avengers: Secret Wars boasts the title it does for a reason.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania will release to theaters on Feb. 17.