Jonathan Majors was supposed to stand trial in court this week for charges of strangulation, assault, and harassment. Instead, the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Creed III actor is now expected to appear in court on September 6, exactly four weeks before Loki season two debuts on Disney Plus.
If found guilty, the 33-year-old actor’s career — which started out this year as the one to look out for — will crumple as quickly as Thanos snapped his fingers in Avengers: Infinity War, not to mention land him behind bars. Following the news of his arrest in March this year, Marvel stayed noticeably silent on the predicament, choosing at times to ignore the elephant in the room entirely. However, the trailer for Loki season two makes clear that the studio plans to plow ahead without sweeping the Kang actor under the rug entirely. At least not yet.
Had Majors’ court date stayed the same, Marvel would have had nearly two months to iron out any PR nightmares before Loki dropped. The studio is now looking at just four weeks, maybe less, depending on how long the trial lasts, to put out fires. If all goes according to plan and Majors’ name is cleared, the studio can proceed as planned. If not, don’t be surprised if the show undergoes last-minute edits to shrink, or even entirely remove, Kang’s time on screen.
Should Majors need to be edited out of the show in any shape or form, Loki is looking at a similar fate that befell Secret Invasion. In the best-case scenario, the script remains the same. In the worst-case scenario, we get a disjointed plot sewn together from the carcass of what should have been.
Either way, Loki season two will arrive fresh off the heels of Majors’ new court date, which is about the worst form of marketing it could have hoped for. If it doesn’t reach at least one million viewers in its first week, then it will continue the studio’s downward trajectory. If that happens, the MCU Disney Plus boom will surely be over because if Marvel’s fan favorite, most-watched Disney Plus show can’t save the day, nothing can.
