“Avengers: The Kang Dynasty” has been retitled with a fully tilting pivot point. The next Avengers films are ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ and ‘Avengers: Secret Wars’ and are both directed by the Russo Brothers.
Directors Joe and Anthony Russo are once again teaming up with Marvel Studios to direct the next superhero team-up film. On Saturday night, they made their return official by taking the stage at San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H to thunderous applause.
“When we directed ‘Avengers: Endgame,’ we truly believed that this was the end for us in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” Joe Russo told the audience. “That four-film series was incredible, and we spent some creative time on it.” In the time that followed, however, the duo found a “very special story” that convinced them to come back. In fact, “It’s the greatest story Marvel comics have ever told. It’s the reason Anthony and I are here.” And that movie is ‘Avengers: Secret Wars’.
But to build towards the epic battle that is “Secret Wars,” the story would need the kind of very important character that is “needed” to do “Secret Wars” justice. So enter Doomsday to be played by Robert Downey Jr., the man who helped put the MCU on the map with his diabolical turn as Iron Man/Tony Stark. The first film is called “Avengers: Doomsday” and will premiere in May 2026, followed by “Avengers: Secret Wars” in May 2027.
The Russo brothers replace Destin Daniel Cretton, who left the film in November 2023 to focus on other Marvel projects in his role, including a future 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 for this ‘Avengers’ film and its sequel, ‘Avengers: Secret Wars,’ which is intended to be the ‘Endgame’-like conclusion to what studio chief Kevin Feige called the Multiverse Saga in 2022.
The Russo brothers are far from strangers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They previously directed the two most recent “Avengers” films, “Infinity War” and “Endgame,” and two “Captain America” films, “The Winter Soldier” and “Civil War.” After making the “Avengers” films, both of which earned more than $2 billion at the box office, the Russians left Marvel to direct “Cherry,” a gritty crime drama starring Tom Holland, Netflix’s “The Gray Man,” an action thriller. starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, and the streamer’s upcoming film ‘The Electric State’.
Many observers believed the decision to rename “The Kang Dynasty” was inevitable after Jonathan Majors — the actor who played Marvel supervillain Kang for two years — was convicted in December of assaulting and harassing his now ex -female friend. . The studio parted ways with the actor less than two hours after the verdict was announced, capping nearly a year of uncertainty over Majors’ future with Marvel following his arrest in March. But the studio remained mum on whether losing Majors also meant saying goodbye to the Kang character.
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 portrayed Kang several times, including in the first and second seasons of ‘Loki’ and as the main villain in 2023’s ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’. In that film’s mid-credits scene, Majors even appears as a army of Kang variants; taking over all those performances would be a tall order for any new actor.
More importantly, audiences haven’t really embraced Kang as a character, or the multiverse as a narrative engine, in the same way that Thanos and the Infinity Saga served as a solid narrative backbone in the 2010s. The Season 2 finale of “Loki” concluded Kang’s storyline, allowing Marvel to move forward without unnecessarily disrupting their broader plans for the Multiverse Saga. With this new title, that seems to be exactly what the studio is doing.
