Marvel Studios is renowned for revealing information about its upcoming MCU films at San Diego Comic-Con. The Marvel Panel was hosted by Kevin Feige this year at SDCC, and he shared details on the future Phases 5 and 6 films as well as the Disney+ series.
But Kevin Feige surprised countless fans with a totally unexpected reveal — the titles of the upcoming two Avengers movies, currently scheduled to release in 2025 as part of Phase Six of the MCU. And as many fans had suspected, Kang the Conqueror will be the main villain in the Avengers’ eagerly anticipated return to the big screen.
Avengers: Secret Wars, named after a famous comic book event that has generated a lot of fan speculation ever since Endgame, is the sixth and final movie in the Phase Six series. Its predecessor, The Kang Dynasty, is titled after a less well-known story arc, and it will be directed by Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton. There is perhaps a no better time than now to look into the background of the comic book Kang and his best comic storyline—despite the fact that there is still a long wait before the movie’s May 2025 release date.
Who is Kang the Conqueror?
The 30th century of Earth-6311 saw the birth of the man who would become Kang. In this world, Nathaniel Richards, also known as Reed Richards’ father, who was brought here under unusual circumstances, unites opposing tribes and rules them as the Warlord until his wife succeeds him. When the Fantastic Four show up to put things right, a fight breaks out, and the Four win. After that, there is peace on Earth-6311 for a thousand years.
Kang, who shares the name Nathaniel Richards, is probably a direct descendant of that original Warlord. He devotes himself to researching tapes of 20th-century superheroes, notably the Avengers, because the age of peace and wealth in which he currently lives is totally boring to him. He receives a visit from his future self while he is a teenager in an effort to kick-start his quest for victory. Instead of adopting the older Kang’s villainy, he travels through time to create the Young Avengers as Iron Lad. He goes back to his time period after realizing his presence in the past is beginning to disrupt the flow of time.
As Iron Lad, he makes repeated efforts to travel into the past, frequently causing significant damage unintentionally. Additionally, for a short moment, he takes on the evil Kid Immortus persona. He ultimately follows his original plan, though, and uses his ancestor’s time machine to travel to ancient Egypt.
Rama-Tut
When Kang arrives in Egypt, he soon crowns himself as Pharaoh Rama-Tut using the weaponry and robots he finds amongst his ancestor’s treasures. Rama-Tut establishes himself as a god and denounces other gods as his reign progresses, which irritates Moon Knight’s eventual patron Khonshu.
It turns out that for time travelers, this era of Egypt serves as Grand Central Station. In addition to the West Coast Avengers, Rama-Tut must deal with an assassin by the name of Killpower and a number of evil organizations. The latter group uses Rama-Tut’s time machine because their own can only go back when traveling through time. Unsurprisingly, Rama-Tut is unwilling to help them, but Khonshu shields them from his anger. In this time period, Doctor Strange is also alive, searching for a soul fragment that poses a threat to all of humanity’s goals.
Doctor Strange and The Avengers, despite all their activities within this timeline, take care not to interfere with the Fantastic Four’s visit, which is the primary event. Upon their arrival, Rama-Tut smashes them and imprisons the male members while he gets ready to wed Sue Storm. Fortunately, the Thing escapes and overthrows Rama-Tut’s empire. In an effort to go back to his original time, Rama-Tut escapes in his time machine.
The Kang
When Rama-Tut tries to go back to the 1930s, he learns the limitations of time travel. He momentarily winds up in the mid-twentieth century, where he meets Doctor Doom. They discuss working together to take on the Fantastic Four, but Doom believes it would be risky. Later, Rama-Tut makes an attempt to trick the original Avengers into destroying all other superhumans on Earth. As a result, he adopts the armored persona of the Scarlet Centurion. He attempts to defeat them with his more powerful Avengers squad by bringing an Avengers team from a later time period to this timeline. However, the modern Avengers win, and the Scarlet Centurion is immediately thrown back into time.
He quickly gives up that persona and returns to his Rama-Tut persona in an effort to travel back in time to the 1930s. This time, he misses it by a thousand years, arriving in the 40th century. He finds a civilization that has been destroyed by war and is ignorant of its own technologies. This is the point at which the person is formerly known as Rama-Tut ultimately adopts the name Kang the Conqueror and builds his famous purple armor. He quickly takes control of this destroyed Earth before moving on to conquer entire galaxies.
Avengers, the Celestial Madonna, and Ravonna
In his debut appearance, which was shown in Avengers #8 from 1964, Kang battles the Avengers. Despite overpowering them at first, Kang loses when Rick Jones betrays him. Unexpectedly, he later travels back in time to the Avengers’ past in order to ask for their help after falling in love with the disobedient Princess Ravonna. She eventually gives her life to save Kang and is then put in a cutting-edge stasis between life and death. Kang continues on to use the Avengers as props in order to obtain the Grandmaster’s control over life and death. However, he chooses to kill the Avengers rather than save Ravonna when he ties the Elder in a cosmic game. When the Black Knight strikes him, this plan is foiled, leaving Kang with nothing but regret.
Kang becomes obsessed with the idea of the Celestial Madonna, the woman who will give birth to the Celestial Messiah, the most powerful being in the universe, and makes a concerted effort to kidnap her. After reducing the list to Agatha Harkness, Scarlet Witch, or Mantis, he captures the Avengers. He is then defeated by a future self who helps the Avengers. At this point, Kang discovers that he will eventually turn into Immortus, a time traveler who neglects conquest in favor of making mysterious movements from Limbo, a dimension outside of time.
The Council Of Kangs
Kang develops a variety of distinct identities as a result of his frequent time travel, all of which are under the watchful eye of the Council of Kangs, which has its headquarters in Limbo. Defective Kangs are removed from the timestream by the Council, who then kills them. After being informed that Ravonna is alive, the Prime Kang from Earth-6311 kills one of his parallel selves, then blames the Avengers for the crime after transporting them to Limbo. The Prime Kang became insane after receiving a technology that granted him access to the memories of every Kang he had slain, Immortus then admits that he was responsible for everything.
Then, Prime Kang’s story splits up into two separate timelines. In one, he travels to the 40th century to find healing. In the other, he finds an even greater plot: The Council Of Cross-Time Kangs, a group of entities from across the multiverse that had killed Kang and stolen his armor. This team consists of Kang-Nebula, a woman who took control of the Avengers in order to break through the Time Bubble phenomenon. The other Kangs start moving against her, resulting in every one of the Kangs being lost in the timestream.
Citizen Kang
The 40th century Kang is actively expanding his power. It all connects through the metropolis of Chronopolis and spans 600 years. The Congress of Realities, the Time Variance Authority, an entity called Alioth, and other organizations with their own realms eventually come to his attention as obstacles to his quest to rule all of the time.
As it turns out, Kang-Nebula has made it out of the Time Bubble and shows herself to be an alternate Ravonna. Assuming the persona of Terminatrix, she attacks Kang by using the Fantastic Four as pawns, while Kang does the same with the Avengers. When they clash, Kang gives himself up to save her. In an attempt to find a means to bring him back to life—if only to kill him upon awakening—she is forced to place him in stasis, just as he did to a previous version of her.
The Council Of Cross-Time Kangs is then attacked by Alioth, an old, time-spanning entity. Terminatrix clashes with Revelation, a future version of herself who rules thousands of years from now. According to Kang’s strategy, Revelation helps in Kang’s recovery while Alioth helps in the removal of the troublesome Council. He makes peace with Ravonna, and they coexist happily.
Destiny War
After spending many happy years with Ravonna, Kang ages and becomes bored. He eventually reaches the point where he is prepared to return to ancient Egypt and achieve his destiny of becoming Immortus. But he becomes furious as he has a vision of himself as Immortus, subject to the Time-Keepers. He makes the decision to go to war with Immortus, who is under orders from his masters to wipe off Earth due to the threat it represents to the rest of the galaxy. The technology that enables Kang to transfer his thoughts to a new body after his death is destroyed along with a plan for eliminating his temporal rivals. He wants a dangerous life.
Kang joins forces with an Avengers team whose members come from many historical periods to battle Immortus and his never-ending armies from the past. Chronopolis is destroyed by Immortus, and his soldiers also kill Ravonna. Kang manages to escape and gives the Avengers the Heart of Forever. This item, which powered Chronopolis, grants the user the ability to change time without producing a divergent world. The Avengers’ task is to protect Rick Jones and the Heart, who Immortus is trying to kill.
At the end of time, Kang and the Avengers face Immortus’s armies in battle. When the Time-Keepers attempt to physically force Kang to become Immortus, Kang fights back and kills them. As Kang ultimately wins against the unavoidable, a different version of Immortus appears.
The Kang Dynasty
Now that his fate has become his own, Kang is excited about conquest. Kang takes his huge starship, Damocles Base, and declares war on Earth while his adult son Marcus serves as the next Scarlet Centurion. He says it’s for the planet’s own benefit because it’s in a lot of danger.
As usual, the Avengers are against him, but this time Kang is serious. As the head of the Avengers, the Wasp is forced to personally submit to him once he conquers the Earth. Marcus is supposed to destroy the Master of the World’s defenses, but things go wrong when he meets Carol Danvers and falls in love with her right away. He helps her in overcoming the Avengers’ defenses. As a result, the Avengers end up defeating Kang in the end, with Captain America taking him out in a titanic space fight.
The Avengers capture Kang, but he actually accepts his fate and is glad that his son will take over as ruler. However, Marcus frees him from his prison and keeps trying to be Carol’s helper. Kang is completely aware of this betrayal, but he was prepared to move on if Marcus had simply abandoned him and allowed him to pass away as a legend. Kang kills Marcus after revealing that he is actually the most recent of many cloned attempts at an heir. He will not put up with a dishonest heir.
Kang Vs Ultron
Since Kang is nothing if not practical, anything that endangers multiple realities also endangers his own interests. For instance, when Adam Warlock is forced to take action to prevent a disaster, he annihilates alternative timelines, many of which feature Kang’s rule, and creates one in which he becomes the evil Magus. In response, Kang uses the Guardians of the Galaxy and Starhawk, who have survived in all realities, as his forces. Star-Lord finally kills the Magus after a number of Guardians lose their lives, fixing the timelines and solving Kang’s issue in a timely manner.
Later, Kang discovers that in a future where his kingdom was in danger, Ultron had killed the Avengers and stopped Kang from the ruling. Kang sends team after team of heroes to battle Ultron, but they are all killed. Of course, if you put too much pressure on the timetable, it breaks. Kang forces Immortus to interfere by causing a time leak and time loop around his battles with Ultron. Before any fighting even starts, he convinces the Next Avengers, the modern team’s offspring, to seek the help of the existing Avengers in order to reason with Ultron. Ultron agrees to give up because he is aware that time itself is in danger of being destroyed. Kang eliminates him, resetting the timeline.
A Variety Of Kangs
Kang often accidentally produces different versions of himself because the timestream is so glitchy, and he is careless. The early 21st-century prisoner Mr. Gryphon is one of them. He attempts to conquer Earth but is unable to travel through time. He doesn’t have an army, so he builds a financial empire using his advanced knowledge. He attempts to send a Chitauri army to Earth, and when that fails, he makes an attempt to steal Thor’s hammer because of its capacity to bend time. Instead, Thor throws him into the timestream.
Another future-looking Kang sees an all-powerful Thanos on the verge of wiping out the multiverse in the present. Kang is taken prisoner by Thanos, but Adam Warlock frees him. In order to stop the future Thanos, Warlock rescues the current Thanos while Kang diverts his attention.
What will Kang do next? Most likely more conquering, time travel, and heir-seeking. It’s a sure bet that he’ll find a way to include the Avengers, his favorite playmates, in his plans. Although he has never achieved complete success, he has never given up trying, which is why his fans like him.
