Before ‘Avengers: Doomsday’: Inside the Canceled ‘Kang Dynasty’ Plot That United All 3 Spider-Men
With Avengers: Doomsday coming to theatres later this year, we’re all excited about seeing Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom, the legacy X-Men heroes, and so on. But before Doomsday, the Avengers movies were originally going to continue with The Kang Dynasty — a movie with a very different story.
Before Marvel Studios made the huge announcement that Robert Downey Jr. would return in Avengers: Doomsday (but as Doctor Doom, not Tony Stark), the franchise was heading in an altogether different direction. The original plan saw Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror establish himself as the all-encompassing villain of the MCU. He was beginning to take a hold, too, thanks to appearances in Loki and Ant-Man: Quantumania. However, following legal issues, Majors was axed from the franchise, and the writers instead explored a different story, seeing Robert Downey Jr. become the franchise’s villain.
Avengers: The Kang Dynasty was originally scheduled for May 2, 2025, and later shifted to May 1, 2026, before Marvel Studios dropped the project entirely. The move was a big one, but understandable: there was a big lack of faith in how the Kang story was developing. Plus, audience reception towards Kang was tepid at best. Those reasons, combined with poor box office performances of Ant-Man: Quantumania, saw the MCU switch focus to Avengers: Doomsday, which by the looks of the trailer, is the most ambitious Marvel movie to date.
While The Kang Dynasty has been scrapped entirely, it’s interesting to see how the movie would have played out in a different timeline, and the recent release of the trailer has had us looking back to a post on X by long-time industry leaker MyTimeToShineHello. The description is very interesting to say the least, perhaps most notably marking the return of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s respective Spider-Men, following on from their returns in Spider-Man: No Way Home. More over, Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider was also going to come back — which is funny to think about now, with the MCU now officially moving forward with Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider.
Check out the leaked description below:
In this film, the TVA began gathering Anchor Beings from across the Multiverse, believing they are the only ones powerful enough to defeat the Council of Kangs. Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield were the Anchors for their respective realities, while Tom Holland’s Spider-Man served as the Anchor for Earth-616. The movie was intended to be smaller in scope compared to SECRET WARS, focusing more on Holland’s Peter Parker, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and other Anchors like Nic Cage’s Ghost Rider. The plan was for all of them to ultimately fail, leading to the collapse of the Multiverse and Kang’s creation of Battleworld. This would then set the stage for SECRET WARS, where other MCU characters and additional Multiverse figures would converge on Battleworld.
It’s fair to say that The King Dynasty would’ve been an epic, but overall, the fact that Marvel Studios moved to Doomsday feels like a stronger alternative. Doctor Doom has not had the same build-up that Kang did, but he’s objectively a more insidious villain, and being played by Robert Downey Jr. adds plenty of extra weight and narrative intrigue.
Avengers: Doomsday premieres in theatres on December 18, 2026.
