With Thanos defeated for good and the Infinity Saga brought to a conclusion, the way has been paved for a new villain to battle the Avengers. With the casting of Jonathan Majors in Ant-Man 3, speculation is rife that he’ll be playing Kang the Conqueror, who in the comics is a longtime foe of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. If correct, though, it raises the question of why the time travelling supervillain waited until now to make his grand entrance. But according to a new fan theory, it’s all to do with Thanos.
First off, time travel was only developed after the Mad Titan’s initial victory in a desperate attempt to undo the Snap, so without this impetus, the technology allowing Kang to travel back through the centuries via the Quantum Realm would have never existed.
However, this still leaves the problem of why he chooses to arrive in the 2020s, where an army of superpowered heroes await him, rather than some time previously when they were, at best, still a disparate assortment of misfits and the organization tasked with world safety was secretly a Nazi death cult. Being from the future, Kang would know that Thanos had been watching Earth due to the presence of the Infinity Stones, but there would be no records of how long he had been doing so. If Kang’s attempted invasion had been noticed by the Mad Titan, he would likely have been taken out before he had the chance to become a threat to Thanos’ mission of destruction, since despite Kang being physically enhanced through futuristic technology, he’s still a human absent of special abilities, and would be no match for Thanos in a straight fight.
As a result, the safest bet for Kang would be to arrive after the big bad’s crushing defeat, so there would be no all-powerful space general to oppose him, only mere 21st century humans who Kang’s god complex sees as inferior anyway. The timing also finds the Avengers newly absent of their leadership figures – Steve Rogers, Tony Stark and Natasha Romanoff – meaning the heroes might now not be as united as they were.
Of course, this is all pre-emptive speculation as there’s no official confirmation that it’s actually Kang the Conqueror who Majors has been cast as. However, with the Avengers’ two other traditional enemies, Thanos and Ultron, already defeated, that leaves the man once known as Nathaniel Richards as the next logical major threat, so it is, rather appropriately, only a matter of time before he appears.
