Well, that didn’t take long at all: A little more than an hour after a jury in New York found Jonathan Majors guilty of misdemeanor counts of reckless assault and harassment against ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari, a representative for Marvel confirmed to Deadline the studio has fired Majors from his role as Kang The Conqueror/He Who Remains, a character who was meant to be the main Marvel Cinematic Universe villain for the foreseeable future—he was even going to be the title character in one of the upcoming Avengers movies, The Kang Dynasty.
Majors made his Marvel debut in the first season of Loki and played the bad guy in Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania before reappearing on season two of Loki as a different version of the same guy, with Majors adopting a number of aggravating character quirks that seem even more off-putting in retrospect now that we know we’ll never see a “regular” version of Kang again.
Deadline says that it’s still unclear—possibly even within Marvel Studios—whether or not Kang will be dropped entirely or if he’ll be recast with a new actor, but both would be easy to justify given the current state of the MCU. Loki’s second season ended with Tom Hiddleston’s (former?) god of mischief taking a more active role in keeping the multiverse alive, rendering Kang irrelevant, but also we are dealing with multiverse stories, so Marvel could easily toss off an explanation about this Kang just being a different guy than the other ones. Deadline even notes that this wouldn’t be the first time Marvel hired a different actor to play an existing character (though not for this specific reason), with Don Cheadle replacing Terrence Howard as Rhodey after the first Iron Man and Harrison Ford apparently replacing William Hurt as General “Thunderbolt” Ross in Captain America: New World Order.
Also, Loki creator (and season one showrunner) Michael Waldron recently stepped in to write the next two Avengers movies (including The Kang Dynasty) after director Destin Daniel Cretton stepped down, and as we noted at the time, he seems like an appropriate choice if Marvel is looking for a writer who can untangle this Kang mess—especially now that the studio will be moving forward without Majors.
Whatever’s going to happen, Marvel seems unsurprisingly unwilling to say too much right now. It’s clear that there’s some kind of plan, otherwise this decision wouldn’t have been made so quickly, but Marvel also has a history of announcing too many things too early and then being left to rework all of its plans—like with The Kang Dynasty, and in 2020 when the pandemic threw years of previously announced release dates into disarray.