“Avengers: The Kang Dynasty” has been retitled with a full-tilt pivot. The next Avengers films will be “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Avengers: Secret Wars” and they will both be directed by the Russo Brothers.
Directors Joe and Anthony Russo are uniting with Marvel Studios once again to helm the next superhero team-up feature. The pair of directors took the stage at San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H on Saturday evening to make their return official to thunderous applause.
“When we directed Avengers: Endgame,” we really believed it was the end for us in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” said Joe Russo to the crowd. “That four-movie run was incredible, and it left us creatively spent.” However, in the time since, the duo found a “very special story” that convinced them to come back. In fact, “it’s the biggest story that Marvel comics ever told. It’s the reason that Anthony and I are standing up here.” And that film is “Avengers: Secret Wars.”
The Russo brothers step in for Destin Daniel Cretton, who left the movie in November 2023 to focus on other Marvel projects on his docket, including a prospective sequel to his 2021 film “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” Michael Waldron, who created Marvel’s Disney+ series “Loki,” is writing the script to this “Avengers” film and the follow-up, “Avengers: Secret Wars,” which is intended to be the “Endgame”-style conclusion to what studio chief Kevin Feige dubbed the Multiverse Saga in 2022.
The Russo brothers are far from strangers to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They previously directed the two most recent “Avengers” movies, “Infinity War” and “Endgame,” and two “Captain America” movies, “The Winter Soldier” and “Civil War.” After making the “Avengers” movies, which both earned more than $2 billion at the box office, the Russos left Marvel to direct “Cherry,” starring Tom Holland, Netflix’s “The Gray Man,” with Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, and the streamer’s upcoming film “The Electric State.”
Many observers felt the decision to retitle “The Kang Dynasty” was inevitable, after Jonathan Majors — the actor who’d been playing the titular Marvel supervillain Kang for two years — was convicted in December of misdemeanor assault and harassment of his now ex-girlfriend. The studio parted ways with the actor less than two hours after the verdict was announced, capping nearly a year of uncertainty about Majors’ future with Marvel following his arrest in March. But the studio has remained quiet about whether losing Majors also meant saying goodbye to the character of Kang.
There is precedent for Marvel recasting a high profile role: Don Cheadle replaced Terrence Howard as James “Rhodey” Rhodes in “Iron Man 2” and Mark Ruffalo replaced Edward Norton as Bruce Banner in “The Avengers.” But that was after the original actor had only played the role once; Majors played Kang several times, including on the first and second seasons of “Loki,” and as the main villain in 2023’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” In the mid-credits scene of that movie, Majors even appears as an army of Kang variants; taking over all of those performances would be a tall order for any new actor.
More importantly, audiences haven’t exactly embraced Kang as a character, or the multiverse as a storytelling engine, in the same way that Thanos and the Infinity Saga served as sturdy narrative spines in the 2010’s. The Season 2 finale of “Loki” tied off Kang’s storyline in such a way that Marvel could move on without unduly disrupting their wider plans for the Multiverse Saga. With this new title, that appears to be exactly what the studio is doing.
