Kevin Feige Claims He Was Always Going To Break up With Kang

I love taking one of my best friends to see bad movies on (or around) his Birthday. He’s a February baby, so a bad movie usually ain’t that hard to find. Usually, it’s a fun time! We sit for something like XXX: The Return of Xander Cage and have a splendid time laughing our heads off at Vin Diesel attempting to make it 2002 again (and, honestly, who isn’t?). There can be something rewarding about seeing a bad movie, especially on the big screen, but not if that film is a hodge-podge of CGI, incomprehensible plot points, and set-up for future movies.

That was certainly the case with Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. My good buddy and I found little to enjoy in that supremely messy film. We got a kick out of Cory Stoll being transformed into MODOK (the only character in the film with a story arc), but that did little to improve our moods. But he still did more than Jonathan Majors’ Kang. Majors was playing the character like a theater actor, making him feel too unbelievable, even for an MCU film. That only got worse in the after-credits scene, which saw billions of over-acting Kangs. Despite my negative reaction to the universe’s next Big Bad, I never thought they’d get rid of him.

Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania (you have to say the full title every time) was not good, but I didn’t like any of the Ant-Man films. They’re all subpar comedies that present themselves as the laugh riots of the MCU. Of course, I wasn’t going to like this one. But I assumed they would start ladling Kang into other projects (like Loki) that would be more well-received and go from there. However, about a month later, Majors was accused of abuse, something for which he would eventually be convicted, and Marvel would drop him from their films.

Now, almost two years later (and likely staring down the first appearance of Major’s replacement, Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom), Kevin Feige is claiming they were already feeling apprehensive about Kang’s future in the MCU before Majors was accused of assault by former girlfriend Grace Jabbari. “Even before what had happened to the actor, we had started to realize that Kang wasn’t Thanos,” Feige recently claimed to press. “There was only one character that could be that because he was that in the comics for decades and decades, and because of the Fox acquisition, we finally had it, and that’s Dr. Doom.”

Setting aside the fact that Feige refers to Jonathan Majors assaulting Grace Jabbari as something that happened “to the actor,” I could buy that they were feeling apprehensive about Kang. Not simply because he wasn’t playing well onscreen, but because they had already overcomplicated what his character was after. It’s the next bit that I don’t buy in the slightest. “We had started talking about Dr. Doom even before we officially pivoted from Kang,” Feige claimed. “In fact, I had started talking with Robert about this audacious idea before Ant-Man 3 even came out.” First, Kevin, it’s Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. Second, actually, no, that’s not the truth, Kevin.

I cover a lot of this stuff for this wonderful site, and I remember the news around Robert Downey Jr. being cast as Doctor Doom. It was a big deal! So, my ears immediately perked up at Feige’s claim, because I remember RDJ revealing that conversations with Feige about playing Victor Von Doom had begun in mid-2023. For those keeping score, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania came out in February 2023. I give Kevin Feige credit for a lot of stuff, but there’s no goddamn way he had already approached Robert Downey Jr. about the role pre-release of the film.

It’s probably likely that they were at least waiting to see how Majors’ trial would go, as they didn’t release him until he was convicted. Hell, I’d even buy that they had a plan to start working with Doctor Doom if they kept Majors around, should he be found innocent. But this idea that Feige wanted to right the ship, pre-release of the film, and pre-assault charges does not pass the smell test.