Marvel fans have flocked to social media to debate the most vicious beatdowns across the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as instigated by “the brutality of the Kang vs Lang fight” in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. With the bloodied face of Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang as a reference point, Redittors discussed their thoughts on who was the recipient of Marvel’s biggest walloping, with Reed Richards of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness emerging as a frontrunner.
“Well, Mr. Fantastic was turned into [a] hot plate of spaghetti,” one fan wrote. “Then his brain popped like a balloon. So, him?” That character, played by John Krasinski in the latest instalment of Doctor Strange, received over 1,000 upvotes, but he wasn’t the only name from Multiverse of Madness to be suggested for Marvel’s most vicious demise. “What Wanda did to Black Bolt was even more brutal,” one Reddit user quipped back.
Outside of the Strange-verse, one fan cited the fight between Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers in Captain America: The Winter Soldier as the most brutal, since Rogers “seemed pretty beat when the helicarrier was about to go.” It wasn’t long before the debate veered towards Spider-Man, with fans naming multiple fights between Tom Holland’s Spider-Man and Willem Dafoe’s The Green Goblin as the most intense. “Goblin nearly murdered Spider-Man in [No Way Home],” one fan argued.
“He was pretty f***ed up after that apartment fight and the explosion that killed May.” Other Spider-Man fans suggested the web-slinger’s fight with Mysterio in Far From Home, since that left Peter Parker “fighting a hallucination then hit by train.” Reddit users continued: “There is only so much concrete a guy can eat before the gloves come off.”
While the debate often centred around key fights like this, there were a handful of MCU characters and their injuries that popped-up elsewhere in the thread, including Charles Xavier “going down like [a] snapped toothpick,” Daredevil “basically [being] a punching bag for the duration of his show,” and the Civil War fight in which “Tony took a lot as well as dishing it out.”
Such an onslaught of names means that perhaps the debate around which MCU character suffered the biggest blow might never be resolved, much like the controversy that now surrounds Kang actor Jonathan Majors.