Warning: The following article contains spoilers for both The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Kang the Conqueror was supposed to trump Thanos as MCU’s next big bad who would make the Snap seem like child’s play. But so far, his debut has remained lackluster thanks to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania‘s dull presentation of the character, something that certainly didn’t get better with the latest allegations against Jonathan Majors. And now even the poorly received Super Mario Bros. Movie is confirming that its villain, Bowser, also manages to shine when compared to Marvel’s adaptation of the time-traveling supervillain.
Other than the fact that both films disappointed hopeful fans on destructive levels, their stories, especially concerning their villain’s presentation, are weirdly very similar. In Quantumania, Team Ant-Man ends up getting sucked into the Quantum Realm where they face Kang while in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Luigi lands in the Dark Lands and has to face the evil Koopa King, Bowser.
Just like Kang kidnaps Cassie to ensure Scott’s commitment to his agenda, Bowser nabs Luigi to blackmail Mario (who ends up in the Mushroom Kingdom) as he sees him as competition when it comes to winning Princess Peach.
Apart from other similarities, the biggest remains the insulting defeat dealt to a villain who was supposed to either beat everyone in sight or go out with a bang. The mighty Bowser is taken down by Luigi and Mario, who become invincible thanks to the Super Star and defeat him in hand-to-hand combat. If that didn’t diminish the aura of Bowser’s villainy, Peach shrinking him to miniature form by forcing him to ingest a blue mushroom certainly did the task.
We all remember how Quantumania supremely botched up Kang’s MCU debut after everyone from the film’s director, to the cast, to those associated with the franchise proclaimed him as the most terrifying villain ever. The over-arching plot, which was filtered with unnecessary monologues (for example, Kang’s very Tron: Legacy hype speech for his troops), the underwhelming action scenes, and much more. But the biggest downer — the supposedly all-powerful conqueror was overpowered by… ants of all things.
After blasting the powerless residents of the realm with his weapon, Kang, for some unexplainable reason, decided to engage in a physical altercation with Team Ant-Man, which was followed by him getting overrun by an army of ants. Instead of all the powerful Avengers who would have proved to be a better match for the supposedly super-powerful villain, it is Scott who ends up killing the Conqueror whose existence we were supposed to fear.
But despite rushing to win the title of who sucked the most, Kang loses to Bowser. Bowser lives to see another day at the end of the film as he was merely imprisoned, while Kang is killed off for good after suffering a rather embarrassing defeat. The Koopa King’s failure is nothing when you put it next to the fact that the villain who was supposed to make turning half the universe to dust feel like nothing was erased out of existence by a superhero whose power is to either grow or shrink.
Quantumania is finally hitting its digital debut tomorrow — not on Disney Plus, though — and seeing that other films fared a lot better theatrically yet still managed to attract criticism after their digital release, thinking that Ant-Man 3 will not kick open the prior can of worms about its shortcomings would be underestimating how much it managed to disappoint fans.
