**Spoilers ahead for “Loki.”**
Marvel‘s “Loki” series aired the season finale last week and they announced that Season 2 would be moving forward. However, director Kate Herron has already explained why she won’t be coming back as she will focus on other projects instead.
At the end of “Loki” Season 1, the big cliffhanger sees Loki and Sylvie essentially causing a chain reaction that will lead to a new Multiversal War (if Miss Minutes can be trusted). This means the evil variants of He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) will become a major villain in the MCU, aka Kang the Conquerer. We already know he will at least show up in one project, “Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania.”
But before we get to ‘Ant-Man 3,’ Herron spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about casting Majors. Apparently, she worked closely with Peyton Reed, director of ‘Quanumania,’ since Majors is playing the main antagonist in “Ant-Man 3.”
“Casting was a very surreal experience,” explained Herron. “When I joined the project, we always knew that Loki and Sylvie were going to go to He Who Remains, and the Multiverse would be released. So I already knew when I got the job that it was going to be a massive undertaking to do that and a big responsibility for Marvel to get it right. And Jonathan Majors is an actor that we were all just blown away by; I think everyone who knows his work is blown away by him. And when I knew we had Jonathan, he and I were solely focused on He Who Remains and this version of the character, this variant.”
Herron added, “[The ‘Quantumania’ casting] happened at the same time. So basically, [‘Ant-Man’ director] Peyton [Reed] and I were in that discussion with Kevin Feige and the team at Marvel. We knew he was gonna be in [‘Quantumania’], and we knew that a version of him was going to be in [‘Loki’].”
The Multiverse will likely now play a role in “Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania,” though what that looks like remains to be seen alongside other projects like “Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness,” “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which are both supposed to play quite heavily in the Multiversal space. Will this narrative tool become overworked and quickly lose its charm? Only time will tell.
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The version we see in “Loki” from Jonathan Majors seemed a bit more playful and Wonka-like than we’ll see with Kang in the next “Ant-Man” installment. We shouldn’t be shocked when Kang is defeated only for more variants to appear in other MCU movies. A project like “Secret Wars” could hypothetically be a good place for Kang to become the big bad in a massive event film. The Russo Brothers teased in multiple interviews that “Secret Wars” could be something that could coax them back to Marvel Studios after delivering the massive box office juggernaut, “Avengers: Endgame.”
For now, you can rewatch the Season 1 finale of “Loki” on Disney+, which is available now.