Disney just fired John Majors, the next Big Bad after Thanos for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)

[thewayne]

Granted, they had good reason: Majors was convicted earlier today of assaulting a woman in a car. There are allegations of many other assaults, and there has been a hue and cry to fire him for many months as these allegations have started surfacing. One movie that he starred in - not a Marvel movie - was pulled from release because of this.

This bodes ill for the MCU. It's rough on a movie franchise to fire the next Big Bad when your big tent pole movie for 2026 was Avengers: Kang Dynasty. Thus far, Kang has only appeared in one movie: Ant Man and Wasp: Quantumania (which sucked, IMO) and in both seasons of the Loki series on Disney+. This Rolling Stone article lays out some possible ways to get around the firing of Majors.

The obvious solution is finding another actor, of which there are several options. People have been re-cast in movie series on a regular basis, this is totally doable.

For me, personally, I'd like to see them either dump or postpone the Kang series. The last Ant Man movie was not good, and it wasn't because of Majors: it was because they lost the path of Ant Man, a wise-cracking Average Joe. The great humor that was in the first two movies was completely gone and it just wasn't worth it for me. The thing that made the MCU work for me was the build-up to Thanos: you had all of these individual heroes eventually coming together, and a Big Bad emerges that took their combined strengths to defeat. Now the band is broken up, Cap and Tony are dead (for the time being), some new people are being introduced, let's get some individual movies out and rebuild the team rather than throwing another huge Big Bad on the screen!

AND ANOTHER THING! Stop referencing stuff from the Disney+ streaming service in the movies! There should be a firewall between those sides! That really ticks me off. AND GET OFF MY LAWN!

;-)

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/jonathan-majors-kang-marvel-fired-mcu-future-domestic-violence-loki-avengers-1234931990/

More on the conviction of John Majors for assaulting his then-girlfriend:
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/jonathan-majors-found-guilty-domestic-violence-trial-1234928607/

Comments

[white_aster]

>AND ANOTHER THING! Stop referencing stuff from the Disney+ streaming service in the movies! There should be a firewall between those sides!

OH GOD THIS. I'd already started being annoyed at this tendency in the Star Wars 'verse, where every series references and pulls from every other. But it was particularly bad in The Marvels, which was OK except that it very obviously left out half of the characters' background and worldbuilding because they were explained, no doubt, in a series somewhere. So if someone is trying to come to the movie without that, the movie writing just feels incredibly lazy and ill-explained.

I get why they're doing it, but there's a point where it actively starts alienating people who just want to watch the movies.

[thewayne]

I've completely given up on Star Wars.  NOTHING made since Return of the Jedi has appealed to me in the least.  None of the standalones, nor the latest trilogy.  There's Star Trek that I want to see, but both SW and MCU are pumping out too much content between movies and streaming IMO.  I will not watch that much TV to make any attempt to stay current.  I did watch the Obi-Wan series on Disney+: was not impressed.  We both stopped watching the Boba Fett series - everyone told us it got so much better after the point that we stopped watching!  So what.  And we drifted away from the Mandelorian.  It's just too much.

[white_aster]

Yeah, I gotcha. I admit to having liked The Force Awakens, mostly for where I felt it was going, but then that trilogy divebombed so hard (by moving away from the themes that had so obviously been set up in the first movie) that I never even saw the third one. Rogue One grew on me, and I did watch Andor, but agree that both it and Obi Wan Kenobi (and Boba Fett AND Mandalorian as much as it pains me to say it since it was a must-watch for a bit) just...they just do not nail the characterization, so many times. And sometimes the plot choices are so dumb that I'm like, "...why...would you even think that that was going to work? Like...why? Super good mercenary sir, WHY would you think THAT was going to work when I, an office worker with minimal knowledge of strategy and tactics, could see the flaws in your plan?"

And the flaws become easier to see the longer I watched. Mandalorian I was able to ignore it for a good season or so because it hit so hard on some of my particular theme weaknesses, but in the end, I'm like "nah, I'm good, because I do not trust your writers to write this in a satisfying way." It feels too much like they're playing connect-the-dots, rather than telling me a satisfying story. I might as well take my knowledge and go read some good fanfiction to get my fix. ;P

[thewayne]

It's pretty sad when fanfic and fixit fics can produce better results, isn't it?

[white_aster]

Heh, see, I came to fandom by way of 90s RPGs, anime, and then Transformers (like...the Bay Transformer movies...then the 80s cartoon continuity), so I am pretty used to fanfic being more well-thought-out, better written, and overall more satisfying than canon. Mostly because I am used to the canon doing a character or worldbuilding somewhat right and then completely flubbing the plot execution (sometimes while being hilariously mis-translated). Which is why the Disney multiverse leaves me so cold: when they flub the characters, there's nothing there for me to even fan about. ;P

[disneydream06]

Well, they had to dump him that's for sure.
Part of me is glad they waited until he was convicted though.
That whole innocent until proven guilty thing our country has and forgets about occasionally.

Part of me says they should dump the storyline.
It would really mess things up for Marvel, but better then progressing with a "dead" storyline. :o
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Agreed, they at least waited until he was convicted.  Scripts can be rewritten, we don't know how many movies are in pre-production.  And if there's one thing that Marvel has no shortage of, it's Big Bads.

[disneydream06]

Start working Marvel.
It's needed on several levels. :o

[dewline]

There will be no firewall.

[thewayne]

No, there won't be.  The one thing that Disney wants over all other things is the Almighty $$$.

[arlie]

I wonder what % of people likely to see the movies also have the streaming service. If people without the streaming service find the movies incomprehensible, or annoying, because of these references - or just decide to boycott them on general principle, Disney execs *might* notice the Almighty $$$ and respond.

(Personally, I don't much like any visual media, and tend to a chronic low grade mad at Disney about the inconveniences foisted on users in support of DRM, reputed to be the result of Disney lobbying in favor of its many copyrights. Without that, HDMI would be a much better standard, and I probably wouldn't have daily issues with monitors randomly blanking. So while Disney and its execs are welcome to "get stuffed", my non-watching of their productions wouldn't be a change, and wouldn't have any effect on their income.)

[thewayne]

Another reason to hate Disney is their not releasing product from streaming to home market, or pulling things from home market and putting it in the frozen vault for a decade or so to drive up demand.  Bunch of rotten bat rastards.

[silveradept]

Yep, that's the correct decision. And it's probably also a good decision to hold off on another worlds-spanning Big Bad until you have another team ready to go to defeat it. Possibly with only a cameo or two from the previous team. There's more than enough characters that you could do this several times over before going back to the well, but we all know that the execs are so very afraid of risk and innovation that they'll never put out something like X-Force or other such things.

[thewayne]

They introduced X-Men at the end of The Marvels movie in the first Easter Egg, but it was clearly an AU.  Hard to say how that will work out.  It's been kind of apparent that they have no intention of introducing the mutants into the mainline Avengers MCU.