Disney has been silent so far about the allegations against Jonathan Majors, who was meant to be on trial now for charges of assault, harassment and strangulation after a high-profile arrest in March. (The trial has been delayed to September.) The trailer for Loki’s season 2 revealed that he was still playing the big bad in the show, but there’s no knowing whether that will change in future if he is convicted, or even if he isn’t. I suspect that Disney will try to sweep the allegations under the rug if he’s acquitted, but I really don’t think it would be all that difficult to recast him.
After all, Marvel is known for setting things up and then abandoning them at the drop of a hat. My colleague Josh Coulson has written about how Marvel often fumbles the endings of its shows, and raises a great point about how easily Marvel retcons, forgets, and ignores plot points both major and minor at its convenience.
Eternals ended with a gigantic celestial corpse chilling out in the ocean, and nobody in the Marvel universe seems to be talking about it apart from a single easter egg in She-Hulk. Hulk’s son Skaar was brought up in that show as well, and never mentioned again. Harry Styles was introduced in Eternals’ end credit scene as Starfox, also never to be mentioned again. Death is treated as a minor inconvenience, with people coming back from beyond the veil so often that nobody believes it anymore when a character dies. For god’s sake, they replaced Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle after the first Iron Man. They replaced Edward Norton with Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, and he’s a whole Avenger.
Much ado has been made about the difficulty of replacing Majors in existing Marvel media and future projects. He was meant to be the new face of the MCU, and the next Avengers movie revolved around him as the multiverse-travelling supervillain Kang the Conqueror, but it’s really not that big a deal. Yes, it’s a pain in the ass to recast at this point, and yes, there will be logistical issues, but I can’t imagine the audience is going to care all that much after an initial burst of disappointment, if there even is one. Apart from being the villain in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Loki, Majors hasn’t had that much screen time – certainly not more than Edward Norton had in the first Hulk movie.
Fans have been coming up with ways that Kang could be replaced while staying consistent with the overall narrative of the MCU, including tying the High Evolutionary in as a Kang variant and replacing Majors with Chukwudi Iwuji. But I have serious doubt that Marvel will be willing to do rewrites to this extent knowing they have a movie timeline to keep up with – one that’s already been delayed, mind you. It would be so much easier to just replace the actor and not explain it away, and even better, nobody would care. Audiences have accepted it before, and they’ll accept it again. Marvel fans might wish for more, but don’t they always?