There have been months...nay...years of speculation about what may be next after the Avengers finally deal with Thanos. Apparently the only threat that is more deadly than Thanos is...Thanos from a few years ago (woo?). Don't we deserve to know what, or who, the next perilous threat may be? Not even an after credits scene tease...you spent more than a decade training us with Pavlovian commands and now you leave us jonesin' for a fix? Come on Marvel!
Thanos made his first appearance in Iron Man #55 along with Drax the Destroyer and a few other 'spacey' characters. Thanos is a bad man. He is one of the most formidable villains in the Marvel Universe, and he all but won following the events of Infinity War, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). But now, it seems that the universe is rid of Thanos. So who steps up to fill the void? Who, or what, can be more of a threat than the mad titan?
(END GAME SPOILERS - READ WITH CAUTION) One of the scenes that caught my eye in End Game was when the team was in the middle of their "time heist" and they flubbed gaining the Tesseract in the past. Interestingly enough it is grabbed by Loki who dashes through a void with it. You then pair this with the Ancient One telling Bruce Banner that a missing stone can cause an alternate flow of time, or alternate reality, leaving all the stones vulnerable to attack and causing trouble to arise. Will Loki's act cause a ripple in the MCU that may cause the next big baddie to be revealed? Let's just hope they avoid making Loki the Magneto of the MCU. I don't want him to be the main bad guy every...damn...time. (Update: I wrote this draft prior to the Far From Home Trailer, so it looks like alternate realities are confirmed...yea me!)
If time is broken, the best choice for a villain to try and seek a solution would be Kang the Conqueror. I have said for years, it would be best to end the first grouping of Avengers movies by having Kang show up, basically claiming that the Avengers messed with his future and that he was taking action to "reset" the timeline and allowing for a dramatic shift in the MCU offerings. You could do Young Avengers, Ultimate Marvel, Zombies...really anything cool and have a free reset due to the control of time by the villain. I feel like quantum tunneling is the least exciting way to use time travel but it may be the stepping stone to Kang. The other time travel related story-line may be the Korvac saga which I covered here.
Now that Thanos is out of the way, there may be a whole scourge of villainy coming out of the woodwork. The Kree seem to be a powerful race and capable of cosmic domination through super-powered individuals...but we may have seen their greatest threats. Galactus and other cosmic level beings are capable of existence in the MCU as Ego and Grandmaster show that there is a race of Celestials already identified in previous offerings.
What are your expectations for the next Avengers villain? Do you want to threat to be more earth-based or cosmic in nature? Drop your comments and join in the speculation.
