Marvel Studios has yet to give a reason for why it took Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania such an inordinately long amount of time to hit streaming, but we can speculate that it is at least partially due to the ongoing Jonathan Majors situation. Shortly after entering the MCU in a big way as Kang the Conqueror, Majors was arrested on assault allegations, a matter that is still ongoing in court.
While Majors remains employed by the studio at the time of writing, Quantumania‘s Disney Plus release perhaps gives us an indication of how Marvel plans to deal with the Majors problem for the near-future — and, frankly, it’s rather dubious in nature. With Ant-Man 3 hitting the Mouse House’s platform this May 17, it didn’t take subscribers long to notice that, despite his enormous presence in the film, Kang is not even mentioned in the site’s official synopsis for the film.
This continues on from recent Ant-Man 3 promos curiously cutting out all footage of Majors, a far cry from the original marketing which seemed to hype up Kang above Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang himself. Overall, then, it seems we can say Marvel’s current approach to handling the Majors issue is simply to… pretend he doesn’t exist. It’s especially hard to shake this feeling given that Quantumania‘s D+ arrival is happening immediately after Loki season 2 is confirmed to have been delayed until October.
Majors will obviously reprise Kang, or at least his variant Victor Timely — in the series — so the decision to hold off on airing the new season until essentially as late as possible in the year (thereby creating an uncomfortably stacked final three months of 2023) is a loaded one, to say the least. It prevents Marvel from having to deal with this can of worms sooner than later, but it may cause bigger headaches down the road.
Naturally, this is a delicate, ever-evolving situation – so Marvel perhaps cannot be expected to draw a hard line in the sand at this stage (although many fans certainly believe it should). Nevertheless, this practice of pretending Kang isn’t a thing is clearly not sustainable, given that the studio has already pushed him so hard as the franchise’s new big bad. He may be king of a microscopic realm, but the Kang conundrum is too big to be swept under the rug.