Marvel enters its Multiverse era with Avengers: The Kang Dynasty

Last year, as I was watching Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings at a theatre in Ranchi, something struck me quite powerfully —this was the first time Marvel fans, used as they are to CGI-heavy fight sequences with an unfortunate tendency to blend into each other, were exposed to high-quality Hong Kong cinema-style hand-to-hand combat. I’m talking, of course, about the famous bus fight sequence (equal parts Speed and Rush Hour) about 30 minutes into the movie, where Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) fights off several goons in a crowded bus while also somehow putting on a jacket, a la Jackie Chan. In fact, the scene had been shot with the help of some of the same fight choreographers that Chan had used previously. The director who brought all of this mouth-watering martial arts action to the MCU has now been confirmed as the director of the next big Avengers movie, 2025’s The Kang Dynasty — Destin Daniel Cretton, one of several indie film wunderkinds who are now part of Marvel’s inner sanctum. This dual announcement — Kang as the next Big Bad, and Cretton as the man who’ll bring Kang to the big screen during a Thanos-scale event — was the biggest one amidst a huge weekend for Marvel fans. Cretton’s filmography: Classic ‘small movies’ with a big heart    For the last 5-6 years, Marvel has been investing in a slew of critically acclaimed directors who’ve cut their teeth on small, independently financed projects. Last year’s Eternals was helmed by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Chloe Zhao. The director duo of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, known for indie gems like Ryan Gosling’s addiction drama Half Nelson (2006) and the sports film Sugar (2008), made Captain Marvel (2019). Before Shang-Chi, Cretton was best known for his various ‘small movie’ collaborations with Brie Larson, who would of course go on to play Captain Marvel in the MCU. The two first came together in Larson’s first-ever lead role at age 23, as the young supervisor of a home for troubled teens in Short Term 12 (2013). Both Cretton and Larson were marked as future superstars by the many critics who included this film on their year-end lists; no mean feat for a project that cost only about $1 million. It blended old-school Hollywood underdog charm with a very contemporary brand of self-aware dialogue. Like Silver Linings Playbook, it swung for the fences throughout, emotionally speaking and won more often than not. The duo would reunite in 2017’s The Glass Castle, based on the Jeannette Walls memoir of the same name, about the author’s nomadic, sometimes dysfunctional childhood. Larson also played a small role in Just Mercy, Cretton’s 2019 legal drama where Michael B. Jordan (another MCU alumnus) played a righteous young defence attorney in 1980s Alabama. In all of these films, Cretton’s visual inventiveness and eye for detail stand out—look at the atypical, emotionally muted way in which the courtroom sequences are shot in Just Mercy, for example. Cretton also has a fine ear for the language of family drama, the grim poetry of dysfunction and upheaval. In Shang-Chi, Cretton showed that he’s a fine student of genre cinema as well. Marvel’s first-ever Asian superhero receives a beguiling blend of Hong Kong martial arts cinema and wuxia movies, with a cast of Hong Kong cinema legends to back Simu Liu — Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung lit the screen up. The scene where Yeoh teaches Shang-Chi the ‘divine’ kung fu of their shared ancestors is a Marvel classic by now, as is the climactic confrontation between Leung and Shang-Chi. Visually, these fight sequences are like nothing else in the MCU and that can only be a good thing for the future. Marvel has now taken its faith in Cretton to the next level, with Avengers: The Kang Dynasty (2025) being announced as the next team-up featuring ‘Earth’s mightiest heroes’. With this film, Marvel will enter full-blown ‘Multiverse war’ mode, with versions of beloved superheroes potentially clashing with each other. It’s going to be an exciting, emotionally charged time for fans and Cretton will certainly have his task cut out. Kang the Conqueror Topping Thanos as a galactic-level threat was always going to be a tough act for Marvel, and last week it was confirmed that Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) is going to be the next multi-movie villain for the MCU, culminating in his central role in Avengers: The Kang Dynasty (2025). In the comics, Kang does not have any superhuman abilities per se, but he is a time-travelling, super-intelligent scientist, engineer and technician powered by 40th century technology and a suit of armour that gives him enhanced strength, endurance and agility. His ability to time-travel and also travel across dimensions allows him to pre-empt the Avengers’ moves. In the Disney+ series Loki we saw a ‘variant’ of Kang the Conqueror, called He Who Remains, with Majors making his first appearance in the MCU. As Loki and his variant Sylvie confront him in the final episode, he taunts them and insists that he’s not the devil they see him as, that his control over timelines was a means to a necessary end. “It’s easy. I know it all. I’ve seen it all. Everything you did on Lamentis, I saw. All the stuff the TVA didn’t know about, I knew. All the scheming. All the talking. That little look by the lake. (…) Every step you took to get here: Lamentis, The Void… I paved the road. You just walked down it. I have the rest right here. Everything that’s going to happen. There’s only one way this can go. (…) You know you can’t get to the end without being changed by the journey. This stuff, it needs to happen. To get us all in the right mindset to finish the quest.” He Who Remains then goes on to narrate the story of Kang the Conqueror and this monologue sets the tone for Kang’s future emergence in the MCU. It gives us a peek into the abilities and the awe-inspiring ambition of this new supervillain. “Eons ago, before the TVA, a variant of me lived on Earth in the 31st century. He was a scientist and he discovered that there were universes stacked on top of his own. At the same time other versions of us were learning the same thing. Naturally they made contact. For a while there was peace. Narcissistic, self-congratulatory peace. They shared technology, knowledge. Using the best of their universes to improve the others. However, not every version of me was so pure of heart. To some of us new worlds meant only one thing: new lands to be conquered. The peace between realities erupted into all-out war, each variant fighting to preserve their universe and annihilate the others. This was almost the end, ladies and gentlemen, of everything and everyone.” Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and its announced sequel The Secret Wars will both have many different versions of Kang, presumably—this is the culmination of Marvel’s big Multiverse push after all. This represents an acting challenge of Majors because he essentially has to play a dozen roles with just enough variance to make them distinct but not enough to distance them from the ‘Kang Prime’, so to speak (the one that will be seen for the first time in the next Ant-Man movie). On the other hand, this also presents an opportunity for the screenwriters—this discrete break-up of Kangs gives them the chance to talk about disparate things that may not always have travelled well within the same character. If Thanos and the Infinity Stones represented a kind of brute, inconceivable strength, Kang will personify the cerebral supervillain, someone whose intellect will be matched only by his megalomania. Majors’ stock as an actor has risen exponentially in recent years, with a string of well-received performances in both indie and big-studio projects. It’ll be fascinating to see how he tackles the potentially stifling experience of helming a billion-dollar franchise. 3 years ago, when Avengers: Endgame had hit theatres amidst a blizzard of publicity and fan anticipation, it was a very different world from the theatre-going point of view. In the post-Covid world, it’s been that much more difficult for cinema-owners to fill seats. The premium for going out and buying a ticket for an enclosed space for two and a half hours has risen for everybody, regardless of their location. In this new normal for the film business, cinema-owners will be hoping that Avengers: The Kang Dynasty can bring an Endgame-level windfall for them in 2025. Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .