In my 2023 review I said Marvel had announced this man as the villain of the next decade and that after two hours in his company I didn’t believe it, and I finished by saying show me the Council and I’m interested, show me one of him and I’m not. The Council never convened. The Kang Dynasty became Doomsday. Doom took the throne. This film is now the foundation stone of a building nobody ever put up.
Every other film in this rewatch is part of a story that carried on. This one isn’t. It’s a two-hour setup for a decade that got cancelled, and watching it in 2026 is closer to reading an old prospectus than watching a movie. That makes it considerably more interesting than it was, and not in a way that reflects well on it, because the most engaging thing about Quantumania now is knowing what happened afterwards. I said in 2023 that this was doing a job rather than telling a story, that everything in it was arranged around establishing Kang, and that when the villain doesn’t land the whole structure sags. That’s still the verdict, except time has now removed the job as well.
Was I right, and does being right count for anything?
I want to be careful here, the same way I’ve tried to be everywhere else in this project. I doubted Kang on dramatic grounds: he explains himself at length, he’s beaten by a man who shrinks, and I didn’t rate him at the level of Loki as an antagonist, let alone as somebody who could stand against the genuinely cosmic end of this universe. That judgement held up. The plan was abandoned and Doom took over.
But the plan didn’t collapse because audiences agreed with me. It collapsed for reasons entirely outside the film, and my call happening to match the outcome isn’t the same thing as my reasoning being correct. I was making an argument about drama. What actually happened was about everything except drama. Where I’d defend the 2023 read is much narrower and I think genuinely defensible: a villain whose whole premise is that there are infinite interchangeable versions of him cannot be built the way Thanos was built. Thanos worked through accumulation, a chair and a name and the better part of a decade of waiting, so that by the time he arrived his presence did the work before he opened his mouth. Kang was introduced by showing us his face repeatedly, and each new face devalued the one before it. That was always going to be a problem and it was visible on screen well before anything else went wrong.
Is Doom an upgrade or a panic move? Both, and I don’t think those are in tension at all. It was clearly a course correction made under pressure and there’s no version of events where that isn’t true. It’s also, obviously, much better. Doom is one of the great antagonists in comics, he has a face everybody recognises, he doesn’t require a lecture on variant mechanics before he can be threatening, and crucially there is only one of him. That last part is the whole thing. The Kang concept diluted its own villain by design, and Doom concentrates. So: a panic move that happened to land on the right answer, and I’d rather they got lucky than stayed the course out of stubbornness.
The Council still looks great, which is the sad part
I called the mid-credits scene the best thing in the film, said the way they carried themselves was really awesome, and that for two minutes I could see the version of this that works. Rewatching it knowing it goes absolutely nowhere is genuinely deflating. A stadium of variants, all differently unhinged, bickering about what to do with a universe. That’s a good idea, arguably a better idea than anything in the film it’s attached to, and it now exists purely as a scene pointing at a future that got deleted. If you watch one thing from this film, watch that, and then remember it leads nowhere.
Separate from all the meta-story, my opinion of the film itself is exactly where it was. A three, maximum. The Quantum Realm still looks far too much like an animated cartoon and not enough like a place, which is fatal for a film set entirely inside one. M.O.D.O.K. is still caught between joke and tragedy and lands as neither. Janet still has the most interesting story in the picture and the least room to tell it, and I’d still rather have had the film slow down and let her be honest about what she did down there instead of hurrying through it to get to the next fight. The reception was poor at the time and I don’t think that was unfair either, though I’d say it’s a duller film than a bad one.
Scott Lang is still good company, and that remains the reason this isn’t lower. He’s been the most likeable thing in this franchise since Civil War, largely because he’s the only one who finds any of it ridiculous. Paul Rudd has never given a bad performance in the role. He’s the one person in the franchise who consistently behaves like a normal man who has wandered into something enormous and can’t quite believe any of it, and putting him at the centre of a cosmic-stakes film was always going to be a strange fit.
What does December actually inherit from this? Very little, and that’s the honest answer. The Quantum Realm still exists as a location, Kang is a fork in the road nobody took, and the Council is a scene people remember fondly. If Doomsday references any of it, it’ll be a nod rather than a foundation, because the foundation got replaced. Which makes this the most skippable film in the whole rewatch alongside Love and Thunder, and skippable for a more interesting reason than that one: not because it’s bad, but because the franchise itself decided it didn’t count.
A three then, a three now. There’s something genuinely poignant about a film built entirely to launch something, watched years later by people who know it launched nothing at all. Every piece of setup in it is a promise to an audience that was quietly released from the obligation. I’d still rather have the version where Marvel had a plan and stuck to it, even a flawed one. What we got instead is a better villain arrived at by accident, and one film left holding a foundation stone with nowhere to put it down.
Next in the rewatch: Loki season two, which is where the Kang plan got its most convincing outing, and where the character it was really about found an ending worth having.