Fans of the MCU continue to mull over the developments revealed in the franchise’s latest outing, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
The highly-anticipated film left many fans feeling disappointed, particularly after Kang’s first major introduction failed to impress. Kang is a genuinely impressive foe, and one that will surely present an Avengers-level threat eventually, but the threat he posed to Scott was barely worthy of the franchise’s smallest addition to the team. Kang certainly talked a big game — even hinting at one point that he’d already fought, and conquered, Thor — but in the end, he was relatively simple for Hope and Scott to dispatch.
All that talk has fans contemplating the true threat Kang poses, and reconsidering his claims in Quantumania. When chatting about the Avengers, Kang asks Scott if he’s killed him before, in another timeline. Noting that his victims “all blur together after awhile,” Kang asks Scott if he is “the one with the hammer.”
Fans obviously assumed Kang was talking about Thor — aka, the Marvel universe’s titular man with the hammer — but one fan has another idea. Posting to the Marvel Theories Reddit sub, user Opposite-Arachnid-81 proposed that Kang was hinting toward a very different Avenger. At the conclusion of Avengers: Endgame, the task of setting things across various timelines was left to Steve. The MCU’s former Captain America took Thor’s hammer, along with various other “borrowed” items, back to the times they belonged. During this trip, he could be considered “the one with the hammer,” and thus could have been the Avenger Kang was talking about.
There are a few outstanding issues with this theory, however, as commenters were quick to note below the post. While we are discussing time travel here — which muddies the waters substantially — a few subsequent MCU moments make this theory unlikely. After all, Cap — the same one we seemingly know and love, given his attachment to the surviving Avengers — returned, following his journey through time, to pass his iconic shield onto Sam. If he’d been killed by Kang, how could he return to pass the mantle?
Time travel complicates things, as several people noted, because traveling through time allows new timelines to be created, which could — maybe? technically? — allow Steve to both be killed by Kang and return with the shield, but that would be messy storytelling. It also, overall, simply doesn’t make sense. It is far more likely that the line was tossed into Quantumania as a way to indicate Kang’s impressive power level, by revealing as a one-off that he is strong enough to defeat Thor in a one-on-one battle.
Still, the post certainly got people thinking, and may have even urged some viewers to look on Quantumania with new eyes. The film remains a disappointment for many, but some believe it will become more popular over time. We’ll have to marinate on the film for a few years before we discover if that theory is actually true, but we can, with relative safety, end the Thor/Cap debate here. Even when time travel is considered, Opposite-Arachnid-81’s theory simply doesn’t make sense.
