While Avengers: Endgame showed us what could happen when Earth's Mightiest Heroes travelled through time (to what we're now guessing was another reality), it was Loki that really opened the door to the Multiverse. In the Disney+ series, Jonathan Majors made his MCU debut as Kang the Conqueror Variant, He Who Remains, and we're expecting to see him next in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.
Which Variant that will be is hard to say, but Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness writer Michael Waldron, who served as Loki's Head Writer, has explained Kang's absence from the sequel.
"To me, it felt like we had the biggest, best bullet already, in Wanda," Waldron told Deadline's Hero Nation Podcast. "That when working with Sam, when it was like we should really make the decisions to make Wanda the antagonist of this film. It was exciting and part of that was the feeling of ‘geez, we can’t let another movie go have that fun.’ It because she is going to be so great."
"And I think that if you had introduced Kang, as great as Jonathan Majors is, and as great as he is going to be playing that character, you would have risked the movie just getting maybe over-stuffed."
That makes sense, and the Doctor Strange sequel introduced another key character in Charlize Theron's Clea. She appeared in the movie's mid-credits scene to recruit the former Sorcerer Supreme for a mission into the Dark Dimension, and Waldron opened up about the character's debut.
"We always knew we wanted to introduce Clea, who in the comics is you could say the great love of Doctor Strange, but really in a lot of ways his formidable equal as a sorcerer herself," he said. "Her backstory is fascinating, she's the niece of Dormammu, the giant floating head from the first movie."
"They have a lot of great adventures in the comics, and we knew we wanted to introduce her, but it felt like we had to close the book to some extent on his love story with Christine Palmer, Rachel McAdams' character. Doctor Strange hears that wisdom from Christine to face his fears and be open to the idea of loving someone and then along comes Clea. I guess we'll see what happens next."
We hopefully won't be waiting too long before catching up with Strange again, but if he is off in the Dark Dimension, who knows how long it will be before he returns. Early signs point to the hero having been corrupted by dark magic, and that could spell major trouble for the MCU moving forward.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is now playing in theaters.