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

[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