With Kang the Conqueror set to be the big bad of Phase Five, the fandom expected Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to establish him as the evilest MCU villain to date. But not only did the film fail to do so, it also wrecked whatever reputation the time-traveling supervillain had acquired thanks to director Peyton Reed and Jonathan Majors hyping the character. But fans are still holding on to hope and have pitched one horrifying way to re-instate Kang’s floundering villainous status in the MCU.
The conversation in question has been kicked off by an MCU fan on Reddit who has suggested that upcoming films like Kang Dynasty or Secret Wars should depict the brutal way the Conqueror chose to kill Thanos in Avengers: Mech Strike #4. In the edition, a young Thanos joins the Avengers to help them up the scale in their favor in their battle against Kang who had already killed Black Panther and was crashing time itself by almost entirely controlling reality.
But the Mad Titan overestimates his prowess and sorely miscalculates his adversary’s penchant for wreaking havoc. So, when Thanos goads Kang into fighting him, all the cosmic villain has to do is take a hold of the former’s neck and swiftly age him in a matter of seconds, reducing the mighty being into dust.
Many agreed to MCU adapting this particularly gruesome defeat of the Thanos variant. After all, a villain who needed the Infinity Stones to stand a chance against the Avengers getting so spectacularly annihilated by Kang would establish the superiority of MCU’s next big bad.
And if Marvel is not invested in the idea of bringing back Thanos as a variant, fans also have a solution that would solve the “will the MCU continue with Fox’s X-Men or get their own versions?” problem at the same time.
But majorly, the sting of Quantumania debuting a poor and rather underwhelming adaptation of Kang still remains.
Whether Kang (or his variants) time-wipe Thanos or not, the studio does need to revamp the image of its new villain. After being one-upped by giant Ants and Scott Lang, Kang is sitting very low on the ladder of MCU villains and if Phase Five is dead set on him being the menace that blows up reality, the next appearance of the big bad will have to work hard in giving the necessary foundation to the airy claims of him being worse than Thanos.