Former MCU star Jonathan Majors has set his first acting gig since being convicted of assault and harassment earlier this year. The Loki and Creed III actor will play the lead in a new supernatural revenge thriller from Martin Villeneuve, the younger brother of Dune filmmaker Denis Villeneuve.
Based on an original screenplay by Frank Hannah, Merciless "follows a top CIA interrogator who, after the woman he loves is overtaken by a malevolent force, is forced to go even darker to defeat it. The movie is scheduled to shoot in Saskatchewan in late fall.
“Merciless intertwines themes of possession, revenge and personal justice within a haunting narrative. It explores the psychological descent of John, played by Majors, and the supernatural forces challenging his sanity,” Villeneuve says.
The project was developed by producer Christopher Tuffin, who says he “refuses to let the court of public opinion and selective prosecution undermine great art and artists.”
“In graduate school, I had the good fortune to study screenwriting under Blacklist scribe Millard Lampell and learned from him the dangers of letting politics undermine due process and deprive artists of their careers,” Tuffin went on. “I consider it an honor and a privilege to be working with Jonathan, who is such a great talent, now that this matter has been adjudicated.”
Majors 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 counselling.
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? It may depend on how Merciless is received, but plenty of Hollywood stars have done so after being accused of and found guilty of worse, so we wouldn't be at all surprised.