Having become famous for maintaining the thickest veil of secrecy for as long as possible, it’s beginning to become apparent in the wake of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania that perhaps Marvel Studios shouldn’t be actively withholding information from the people it hires to bring its blockbuster comic book adaptations to life.
We’ve all heard the stories of various stars only being given certain script pages relating to their characters so that nobody gets the full picture until cameras start rolling – with Robert Downey Jr. notably the only member of the cast given the entirety of the Avengers: Endgame screenplay for his perusal – while the company reportedly even has a genuine secret police who leave false documents out in the open to weed out those bold enough to try and leak details ahead of time.
However, extending that mandate to the key creatives is one step too far, and it shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone to find out that Quantumania writer Jeff Loveness recently admitted that he had no idea Kang the Conqueror was being lined up as the Multiverse Saga’s end-of-level boss when he was first tasked to crack the story for the recently-released threequel.
Loveness openly referenced Marvel doing its “secret vampire cabal planning behind the scenes,” before going on to add that “Kang the Conqueror was available, but there was no impetus to making him the next big bad.” Knowing how the MCU has operated since the very beginning, Kevin Feige would have decided long before Quantumania entered development where things were headed, and maybe we could have ended up with a better-written movie if the guy writing it was let in on the ground floor.