Jonathan Majors arrested for domestic violence

I have a feeling Marvel is going to wait and see what happens with the hearing before making a decision on whether they will recast Kang or keep him.

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And we'll never see him again

He was not only Kang. He was the Kangs (a whole gallery of alter-villains). Endless Thanoses on tap, gone in a snap.

All I'm thinking is it's weird they did it with Jonathan Majors, but not with Ezra Miller. Maybe they were too far into production or something.

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That's two different companies. But you're right - The Flash was finished (barring any re-shoots), whereas no movie with Majors has really made any major headway (given the strike).

So you're saying that The Flash was just a little too fast to catch in time?

Ba dum tss.

They finished shooting The Flash in 2021...Miller has seemingly been cancelled

The danger of investing too heavily in a single person is that you now have a single point of failure and your entire franchise might be held hostage by that person (e.g., as a certain political party is now trapped in the general orbit of a man who made himself into a brand).



This is where the ruthlessness of soap opera casting makes sense. Tune in tomorrow and out of the clear blue a disembodied voice says "the part of Dr. Heartthrob will now be played Kyle McSixpack." And that person may look nothing like the original actor. Just moving on. No death or scandal threatens the production.



Our AI future will be interesting. Actors who never age, complain, or kill families driving home drunk. Perhaps we will still be scandalized when an AI hologram shows up to support Israel or Palestine? And we should remember the narcissism that drives the star-phenomenon. We want to imagine it is ourselves in the limelight. Taylor is the human projection of her Swifties ("She is the version of us who made it, we live through you Tay-tay!"). We want to see people win awards, because we want to imagine ourselves winning awards. If it is all AI, then no one is in the limelight. Thus the great scandal will probably be when the "human talent" is unmasked as an AI, in whole or in part. So, the future will probably be a never-ending treadmill of studios trying to convince us that fake actors are real and internet sleuths attempting to prove the real actors are fake (i.e., the practical or CG debate writ large).

I thought John Majors was a British politician.

Is he related to the Six Million Dollar Man?

If he was Kang then he was also Immortus, Rama-Tut, the Scarlet Centurion, Victor Timely, Iron Lad, Mister Gryphon and Nathanial Richards (which is the same name as Reed "Mr. Fantastic" Richards' father)!

(Don't ask me, take it up with Marvel.)

The only thing he definitively was NOT during 59 years of comic book publication history was African American. I'd let people get away with saying he was "Blue", but we saw him enough times with his mask off to know his skin color was not blue.

For his PR team? Yes, that's probably the price tag. They can rebuild reputations. They have the technology.

Geez, just recast him... It's not like it's some huge conundrum like Black Panthers Chadwick Boseman.

If he is guilty of domestic violence then recasting is a nice little punishment.

If he is recast... will this character who was never black, now HAVE to be black?

I'm just curious how things work these days: if you are anti-tokenism (and I oppose tokenism) then are you anti-racist or racist?

Yes, if they decided to conceive the character as black in this context, then of course they'd recast with a black actor. The whole point of recasting is to minimize change as much as possible to preserve as much suspension of disbelief as possible.

The only real choice here is whether they simply recast Kang, or whether they move away from the character and their plans for the upcoming phases totally, which I have to imagine was already under consideration not just because of Majors' troubles, but because of growing discontent with their storytelling and production the last few years.

Yes, it's a mostly one-way filter. You can re-imagine white characters as black. You can even re-cast actual white historical figures as black in your hip-hop Hamilton or BBC historical biopic or Netflix docudrama. You cannot, however, so easily reverse the polarity. That would be run afoul of appropriation, white-washing, erasure, gentrification, etc.



Yoda brings up a more proximate and palatable idea, but both reasons can be true, and they are. It's not either/or, but rather overdetermination: Kang is black. I reckon that this is a "fact" that will obtain for at least another five years (you might reboot him after that as something else).



It's interesting how the rise of super-franchises has made (real-world) character a problem. If you're just making one or two movies, you don't have to sweat your star doing something stupid. If, however, you're building a whole damned universe with TV shows, side-quels, prequels, cartoon, mech, action figures, video games, and a primary edifice of interconnected headline feature films (each of which needs to crack a few hundred million to make its nut). Now you're getting married to your talent. It's not just a question of who is hot and available. Now we have to ask if you trust this person for a long-term relationship. You're not just getting in bed. You're moving in together.