Earlier today, Variety released a stunning exposé on the problems plaguing Marvel Studios. There’s a lot of shocking stuff in the article, but one line in particular is haunting me.
The article indicates that the Loki season 2 finale, which airs on November 9, will focus largely on Kang the Conqueror. Kang is played by Jonathan Majors, who’s preparing to stand trial for domestic violence charges. “Marvel is truly f*cked with the whole Kang angle,” says one anonymous source who has reportedly seen the finale. “And they haven’t had an opportunity to rewrite until very recently [because of the WGA strike]. But I don’t see a path to how they move forward with him.”
Regardless of how Marvel handles Majors’ presence in light of the allegations against him—they’ve already recast other characters for other reasons, replacing Edward Norton with Mark Ruffalo for the Hulk, and Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle for War Machine, but it’s still not an enviable task—if the article is accurate and the Loki season 2 finale is even more devoted to Kang than the rest of the season has been, then that doesn’t bode well for the season’s storytelling.
I’ve already complained, multiple times, that Loki season 2 feels largely uninterested in Loki himself, often relegating him to the background as the plot focuses on endless tinkering with the Temporal Loom. If the season finale is just a setup for Kang’s next appearance, then it may end up feeling like there was really no point to a second season at all.
Especially since that was the finale of last season. Remember how the entire last episode was a long introduction to He Who Remains? I was one of the viewers who thought the finale worked, even though it was unorthodox, but I dread the thought of sitting through the same concept again. After Loki season 1 and the post-credit scene in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, how many more intros to Kang are we expected to sit through? Could the multiversal war please just start already?
All these problems point to the deeper issues facing Marvel Studios: a mandate, presumably from its parent company Disney, to produce as much content as possible, while giving the people who actually make that content as little money, time, and resources as possible. Writers spent the summer striking, actors are still trying to get a fair deal, and VFX workers are unionizing. Meanwhile, Marvel (again, under Disney) has taken a formula that worked—telling largely self-contained stories that also weave together a larger narrative—and killed it by trying to do too much, too quickly. There’s the reason the Golden Goose is such an enduring fable: because every time short-sighted executives get their hands on one, they waste no time in hacking it to pieces.
(featured image: Disney+)
