Kang Is the Right Villain for the MCU, But the Wrong Villain for Quantumania

This article contains full spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (review) is now in theaters, and if there’s one thing most of the reactions to the film seem to agree on, it’s that the MCU’s newest archvillain Kang the Conqueror is the big highlight. Between a strong performance from Jonathan Majors, a comic-accurate rendition of his costume and persona, and the promise of plenty of strange and menacing variants popping up in future projects, it appears the MCU made the right choice in adapting this classic Avengers nemesis as the lynchpin of the Multiverse Saga.

However, there’s also a gnawing feeling when watching Quantumania that although Kang is one of the movie’s strongest elements, he doesn’t quite fit in as well as the filmmakers intended. Making one of the Avengers’ most powerful foes the villain of an Ant-Man threequel was certainly a bold choice that director Peyton Reed was conscious of, yet one of the film’s ostensible goals (establishing Kang as a threat for future films) consistently runs counter to what Quantumania actually does. More specifically, the tone, structure, and ending of the film all wind up undercutting Kang instead of building him up. How did this happen? Let’s take a look.

Too Much (Quantum)Mania

One of the weirder aspects of Quantumania is that, despite having Ant-Man and the Wasp in the title, it is largely uninterested in either of those characters. Indeed, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) are probably the two members of the central cast with the least impact on what actually occurs. The primary focuses are Kang, Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton), and Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), setting up the former two for future movies and centering much of its minute-to-minute plot around the latter. However, the movie still has the feel and tone of an Ant-Man installment (yet is sadly devoid of much of Ant-Man’s pre-established supporting cast), which makes sense given that it’s directed by Ant-Man franchise custodian Reed. But this winds up not serving Quantumania’s antagonist particularly well.

In theory, placing heroes as irreverent and wholesome as the Ant-Family against a villain with multiverse-conquering aspirations and Shakespearan gravitas could be a great off-beat concept from a dramatic standpoint. But in execution, Quantamania often feels like it’s too enamored with the wacky antics of prior installments splashed with a coat of Star Wars paint. From the freedom fighters with talking goo creatures and walking buildings in their roster, to the breakneck pace that doesn’t really allow any of the Quantum Realm to register as a coherent space, to the casual goofball humor that the Ant-Man movies have always excelled at, Quantumania is too lackadaisical to give someone as serious as Kang a platform to stand on. In the same way he crashed into the Quantum Realm and decided to conquer it, Kang often feels like he’s a villain from a completely different movie invading this one.

Kang often feels like he’s a villain from a completely different movie invading this one.

The reason this matters is that for as much as the script and Majors’ performance tries to sell Kang as a villain with hidden depths that will be teased out in future installments, his scenes often feel unmoored from the rest of the film. It’s hard to take Kang seriously when he’s bouncing off of Paul Rudd’s earnest dopiness, an army of hyper-intelligent socialist ants, or Corey Stoll’s frankly hilarious take on MODOK. This isn’t automatically a dealbreaker for this movie; after all, everything in that list fits the tone of the previous Ant-Man films. But it doesn’t make Kang feel like he belongs here. Instead, it feels like he was shoved into this movie because Marvel needed to fit his introduction in somewhere before Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. (And yes, a very different variant of Kang appeared in Loki Season 1. More on that in a sec.)

The Marvel Secrecy Setback

It’s not a twist that Kang the Conqueror is the villain of Quantumania. He was named as such when the film was first announced, and he’s been all over the marketing and pre-release narrative regarding his overall importance to the MCU’s ongoing Multiverse Saga. However, someone should probably have mentioned that to the film’s editors, because Quantumania spends far too long hiding its antagonist and many important details about him for no good reason. The film’s structure conceals Kang as if he’s supposed to be a surprise, and while it’s impossible to know if there was some earlier cut of the film where that was intended to be the case, it’s an aspect of the final film that hurts our ability to invest in him.

We first see Kang in the prologue with Janet still trapped in the Quantum Realm, but that scene provides very little context about anything that’s going on aside from us knowing that it must be a flashback because Janet has since been rescued. Once the film starts in the present tense and the Ant-Family all wind up in the Quantum Realm, Janet is secretive about the mysterious figure hunting them, and in conversations with characters like Krylar (Bill Murray) or the freedom fighters, the script elects to have characters refer to Kang as “him” or “the Conqueror” instead of his name. It takes until near the midpoint of the movie for Janet to finally tell Hank and Hope about Kang and her role in his ascendance, and although the explanation is certainly appreciated, it would’ve been better if this was all ironed out in the first act.

Kang does make an impression once he’s finally front and center, but hiding significant story details about him for so long doesn’t do him any favors. Even then, although he goes over a rudimentary version of his personal history that was already discussed by his variant He Who Remains in the Loki series, it still feels like we’re only getting half the story. It’s not that the movie needs to spell out every detail about him for us to be engaged, but Kang is this film’s primary antagonist, and we barely understand his motivation or the reason why he was exiled by the Council of Kangs. Apparently he was just “that bad?” Why? What made this particular Kang variant so special? We never really find out, and if the Council exiled this Kang for being the worst of them all, then the ending botches that idea entirely.

Will the Real Kang Please Stand Up?

Part of Kang’s whole deal in the comics and also now in the MCU is that he has many variants. We’re introduced to several major ones in the mid- and post-credits scenes, such as Immortus, Rama-Tut, Victor Timely, and apparently a take on the Scarlet Centurion (who isn’t scarlet for some reason). In the Council of Kangs scene, we also see hundreds of other Kangs (a direct homage to a panel from Avengers #292). Again, this is par for the course when adapting Kang the Conqueror. However, Quantumania sets up the Kang trapped in the Quantum Realm as the main Kang, and much of the film’s story and structure makes it clear we’re supposed to be terrified of him. The marketing tagline “witness the beginning of a new dynasty” implies that this is only the start of Kang’s reign of terror in the MCU. Which is all well and good, except for two problems: One, he gets defeated by Ant-Man, and two, he appears to die.

Regarding the first problem, Kang the Conqueror is typically thought of as one of the most powerful villains in the Marvel Universe. He’s an archenemy of the Avengers, and it’s usually considered a big deal for them to defeat him. But in his first MCU appearance (again, not counting He Who Remains, who was quite a different character), he’s beaten in the final battle by Scott and Hope. Now, the heroes beating the villains in a comic book movie isn’t exactly a surprise. But for a movie that’s trying to sell Kang as the big villain of the current saga, it devalues his threat level to see him get trounced by probably two of the weakest Avengers (not including Hawkeye and Black Widow, of course). If he’s a problem that can apparently be addressed by Ant-Man and Wasp, why should we be afraid of him when the entire Avengers roster shows up at his front door? It really makes you wonder why the Council of Kangs thought he was such a danger that he needed to be trapped in the Quantum Realm in the first place.

As for the second problem, while it’s likely the specific Kang we saw only shrank down to an even smaller plane of existence instead of being killed (after all, Darren Cross pulled that stunt in the first film), the mid-credits scene contradicts this by teasing these Kangs as what we now have to worry about. Yet this falls a little flat when you remember this is essentially the same rug pull as the one from the season finale of Loki. He Who Remains gets killed, and he says “just wait until you meet my variants.” Now the Kang in the Quantum Realm (possibly) gets killed, but watch out for… his variants? Which Kang are we supposed to be dreading, exactly? Because if every Kang appearance ends with one of them getting killed but another one popping up in his place, it’ll be pretty hard to consider any one of them a tangible enough threat for an entire saga. Again, it’s possible all of this will be explained away in Loki Season 2 or The Kang Dynasty or something in-between, but as it stands right now, the MCU’s Kang is too abstract to be a credible danger. Quantumania certainly seemed to get people excited to see more Kang, but it likely would’ve had more impact if we knew which Kang we were supposed to be getting excited for.

Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.