Former MCU star Jonathan Majors was sentenced today after being found guilty of assault and harassment of ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari late last year, and, as many predicted, the actor will spend no time behind bars.
The Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Loki star was found guilty of two misdemeanour counts of harassment and assault, as well as not guilty on two additional charges of intentional assault in the third degree and aggravated harassment in the second degree. After a recent sit-down interview with GMA backfired, some industry insiders believed that the judge might decide to give Majors a "taste of jail."
“The judge has a wide variety of tools at his disposal at sentencing, including anger management, community service, other programming and jail time. If the defendant says anything to piss off the judge, or insults the integrity of the judicial system, I could easily see the judge giving him a taste of jail,” noted Cary London, a civil rights and criminal defense attorney at Shulman & Hill.
However, Majors escaped with one year of domestic violence counseling, despite an emotional victim impact statement from Jabbari.
“He is not sorry and has not accepted responsibility. He will do this again. He will hurt another women. This is a man who believes he’s above the law,” Jabbari said. “I had a career and life and body, all of which he’s damaged.”
The trades announced that Marvel/Disney had severed ties with Majors almost immediately after the news that he'd been found guilty broke, which would obviously seem to suggest that they were waiting for the verdict before making their decision - though some insiders believe that the studio was never going to move forward with Majors as Kang regardless of the outcome of the trial.
As for the next Avengers movie, "The Kang Dynasty" subtitle has now been officially dropped (no surprise there), and the project is being referred to internally as "Avengers 5" for the time being. To what extent the current story will be altered remains to be seen, but rumor has it that Marvel does still intend to utilize Kang as an important (though maybe not quite as important as he would have been) character moving forward, and are currently searching for an actor to replace Majors in the role.
Will Majors be able to get his career back on track? Plenty of Hollywood stars have done so after being accused of and found guilty of worse, so we wouldn't be at all surprised.