Jonathan Majors' Firing Leaves MCU Fans Questioning Its Future

Jonathan Majors has officially been dropped from all future movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The actor was slated to play the central supervillain Kang the Conqueror in several upcoming projects, most notably Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, however his involvement with Marvel has looked uncertain ever since March, when he was arrested after his ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari accused him of assault.

Majors was dropped by his management team and at least one advertising partner in the wake of his arrest, but Marvel's position on the actor and his legal issues was less clear until recently. Season 2 of Loki, in which Majors played a prominent role as an alternate timeline version of Kang, went out on streaming as planned, and it was beginning to look as if he would continue to play Kang in the next tentpole Avengers movie.

On December 18, Majors was found guilty of two misdemeanor counts of harassment and assault. Immediately following the verdict, Marvel Studios released a statement announcing that he would no longer be appearing in the MCU any capacity.

This leaves Marvel boss Kevin Feige and his team with something of a quandary. They have spent two years now sowing the seeds for a Kang-centric storyline, starting all the way back in Season 1 of Loki in 2021. This year's Quantumania ended on the threat of countless multiverse-spanning versions of Kang, all played by Majors, and he was poised to keep that role until at least 2026.

So Marvel's options are to either pivot hard and rewrite future projects to remove Kang and introduce a new antagonist in his stead, a move which could jeopardize the already wildly-uneven quality of storytelling in the MCU's post-Endgame era... or they recast Kang as soon as possible. Luckily, thanks to Loki, there's already an in-universe precedent for "variants" of characters looking completely different and being portrayed by different actors.

As soon as news broke online that Marvel and Majors had parted ways, the speculation began as to who could take his place as Kang the Conqueror. A number of Black actors have been suggested, including: Tenet star John David Washington; John Boyega, who is no stranger to huge franchises after his time in the Star Wars movies; Trevante Rhodes, best known for his role in the Oscar-winning Moonlight; Aldis Hodge, who appeared in last year's superhero movie Black Adam; and Yahya Abdul Mateen II, who has already played a DC villain and Dr. Manhattan.

Boyega, for his part, has already joked on Twitter that he is not up for the role, and several fans now believe that this is the perfect time to bring in Dr. Doom as a substitute bad guy.

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