Kang the Conqueror is back at Marvel, though not the Kang from the shelved Multiverse Saga, and not played by Jonathan Majors, the actor who spent three years building the character into the next Thanos before his career collapsed. X-Men ‘97 season 2 has introduced a Rama-Tut variant of Kang, voiced by Star Trek veteran John de Lancie, in a show that exists outside MCU film canon even though Marvel Studios produces it. Several outlets have run headlines calling this a “recast.” It isn’t one. Majors was never in the running for an animated series that started casting long after Marvel had already scrubbed him from its plans.
That distinction matters more than the clickbait headlines at places like Screenrant suggest, because the real story isn’t a recast. It’s that Marvel apparently cannot resist putting Kang back in front of audiences, in whatever form it can manage, less than two years after deciding the character was too toxic to keep in live action.
The collapse itself happened fast. Majors was arrested in March 2023 after a domestic dispute with his then-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, in the back of a car in Manhattan. A jury convicted him that December on two misdemeanor counts, assault and harassment, while acquitting him on two more serious counts, intentional assault in the third degree and aggravated harassment in the second degree. He received no jail time. His April 2024 sentence was probation and a 52-week domestic violence intervention program.
Marvel didn’t wait for sentencing. The studio dropped him from all future projects within hours of the December verdict. Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, the film built around Majors as the Multiverse Saga’s central villain, got quietly renamed Avengers 5 before Marvel unveiled its actual fix at the 2024 Comic-Con closing panel: Robert Downey Jr. returning as Doctor Doom, with the film retitled Avengers: Doomsday. Kang, and everything Majors had spent three years constructing across Loki and Quantumania, got shelved along with him.
A misdemeanor conviction with no jail time ended a career that had been building toward carrying the MCU’s next decade. That is the part worth sitting with when a version of the same villain resurfaces in an animated series two years later. If Kang was disposable enough to require razing an entire franchise plan, bringing him back in any form runs against the logic Marvel used to justify dropping Majors in the first place. Either the character was the problem, in which case reviving him anywhere sends a strange signal, or Majors was the problem and the character was always fine, in which case the studio owes him more than it’s given.
Majors, for his part, didn’t wait around for Marvel to change its mind. Daily Wire, the conservative media company co-founded by Ben Shapiro, announced in February that Majors would star in an untitled action film shot in the vein of Red Dawn and Toy Soldiers, produced alongside Bonfire Legend. Filming began that same month in South Carolina. It’s not Majors’ first attempt at a comeback. Sundance had already put out Magazine Dreams, a film he shot before his arrest. But the Daily Wire deal is the first new work built around him since Hollywood decided he was unemployable.
Daily Wire has made a pattern of this. Gina Carano landed there after Disney fired her from The Mandalorian in 2021 over social media posts. Majors is now the second major name to find a home there after mainstream studios walked away entirely. Whatever one thinks of Daily Wire’s politics, the company keeps proving there’s still an audience, and a paycheck, for actors the rest of the industry has decided to erase.
Marvel, meanwhile, seems to want Kang gone and remembered at the same time. The studio buried the character’s live-action future the same week it fired the actor who created him, then let a different voice actor play a variant of the same villain in a Disney+ animated show two years later. X-Men ‘97 showrunner Beau DeMayo has never been shy about slipping industry commentary into the series before his own messy exit from Marvel Animation. Whether the writers intended the Rama-Tut return as a pointed reminder of what Marvel walked away from, or simply reached for a villain that was sitting right there in the source material, the result reads the same either way: the company that couldn’t keep Majors found it could still use his character.
Would Marvel have ever brought Kang back this soon if a different actor’s career hadn’t been the price of getting rid of him?
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