Marvel Studios has parted ways with Jonathan Majors – the actor cast to play Kang, the central antagonist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s multiverse saga – after he was convicted on 18 December of two misdemeanour counts of harassment and assault of Grace Jabbari, his ex-girlfriend. A source close to the studio confirmed the decision to Variety.
The verdict also found Majors not guilty of one count of third-degree assault with intent and one count of second-degree harassment.
The actor was arrested on 25 March on charges of assault and harassment after Jabbari accused Majors of assaulting her in the back seat of a private car after she took his phone to read a text message he’d received from another woman. Jabbari alleged that Majors forcibly removed his phone from her, causing an “excruciating” injury to her right middle finger, and that when she got out of the car, Majors punched her in the back of the head and then tried to force her back into the car, causing a cut behind her right ear.The 34-year-old actor denied assaulting Jabbari. His defence team claimed she was the aggressor when she took his phone.
During the nearly two-week trial, the Manhattan district attorney’s office released a series of disturbing texts between Majors and Jabbari and an audio recording that was used as evidence, including messages in which Majors appears to try to persuade Jabbari not to go to the hospital after a head injury and a message in which Majors threatens suicide. In the recording, Majors tells Jabbari that she needs to act like Corretta Scott King and Michelle Obama because he’s “a great man” who is “doing great things, not just for me, but for my culture and the world”.
Since his arrest, Majors has been dropped by his talent manager, Entertainment 360, and his publicity firm, the Lede Company. He is no longer involved with the Protagonist Pictures film “The Man in My Basement”. The US Army also launched a major advertising campaign featuring Majors, as did the Texas Rangers baseball team. Several other projects involving Majors – including Spike Lee’s “Da Understudy” for Amazon and the Dennis Rodman film “48 Hours in Vegas” for Lionsgate – remain in limbo.
But Marvel’s decision to sever ties with the actor is the most high-profile professional consequence of Major’s arrest and now conviction to date. He first played a version of the multiverse-hopping villain Kang in the season finale of the 2021 Disney+ series ‘Loki’, an episode that established the primary storytelling engine for the Marvel Cinematic Universe going forward, and Majors’ character as the central figure at its heart.
Marvel established limitless versions of Kang across the multiverse. Majors was meant to embody all of them – a premise first explored in Marvel’s February release “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”. The actor went on to play a variant of Kang named Victor Timely in the second season of “Loki,” which aired on Disney+ in the autumn. (Production on the show wrapped months before his arrest.) Majors was next set to star in the first part of the climactic conclusion to the multiverse saga, “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty,” which was originally scheduled to begin shooting in early 2024. In June, Marvel pushed back the film’s release date from 2025 to 2026.
Variety has reported that Marvel executives, led by studio chief Kevin Feige, have discussed the possibility of having to move away from Kang to focus on another major villain. Now that Majors’ departure is official, Feige and his team face some daunting creative decisions, including whether to recast a new actor as Kang or cancel The Kang Dynasty altogether and reconfigure the rest of the multiverse saga. The interconnected nature of the Marvel Cinematic Universe means that whatever Marvel decides could have some costly repercussions at a time when its parent company, Disney, has entered a far more cost-conscious era.
The career implications for Majors could be even more serious. He entered 2023 as one of the industry’s most in-demand actors, co-starring in Creed III with Michael B. Jordan and winning acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival for his performance in the bodybuilding drama Magazine Dreams. Searchlight Pictures – another Disney subsidiary – picked up the latter film as a potential awards contender for a December release, but the company quietly pulled the film from its calendar in October. It does not yet have a new release date.
