RUMOR: The Kang Variant The Young Avengers Were Going To Defeat In THE KANG DYNASTY Was Nathaniel Richards

Following writer Michael Waldron's recent comments about pitching an idea for Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, a new rumor may reveal exactly which variant of Kang the Young Avengers were going to defeat...

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By MarkCassidy - Oct 29, 2025 10:10 AM EST

Filed Under: Avengers: Doomsday

It seems the version of Kang the Young Avengers would have taken down in Avengers: The Kang Dynasty wasn't just a random variant.

During a Reddit Q&A, co-writer Michael Waldron - who also worked on the Doomsday script - shared details of a scenario he pitched to Marvel Studios along with co-writer Jeff Loveness that involved members of The Young Avengers defeating one of the many Kang variants from the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania post-credits scene.

"Jeff Loveness and I spent an afternoon pitching on the Young Avengers defeating a version of Kang and being so stoked about it...only to discover that that particular Kang carried a little card that said to Be Patient with him, it was his first day as a Kang. And then they were so bummed," Waldron said during the Q&A. "I think he was gonna be the lizard Kang from the end of Kang Dynasty? I don't know. Anyway we had fun."

Now, The Cosmic Circus' Alex Perez - who has previously shared details about Marvel's scrapped plans for The Kang Dynasty - has responded to Waldron's comments with the following X post (he has clarified that he is not joking).

And his name was Nate Richards https://t.co/fPE3EiNqLP
— Alex P. (@AlexFromCC) October 29, 2025

Nathaniel Richards, father of The Fantastic Four's Reed Richards, was a time-traveller with a complicated comic book history, who has taken up a number of different mantles across multiple realities over the years. The Earth-6311 version of the character - who may also have been a descendant of Doctor Doom - ultimately went on to become the Kang the Conqueror, but this obviously didn't carry over to the MCU.

Waldron's idea was met with something of a mixed response from fans, and if the inexperienced Kang with the little note was indeed going to be Richards, we can see a lot more people expressing relief that the concept never came to fruition. This character has a lot of potential as a future villain (or hero, should the story require it) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so probably best not to introduce him as a punchline!

Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars were recently hit with significant delays, with Doomsday now set to arrive in theaters on December 18, 2026, and Secret Wars positioned for December 17, 2027.

Both movies will be directed by the Russo brothers, who also make their MCU return after helming Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

"Being able to create stories and explore characters within the Marvel Universe fulfilled a life-long dream of ours, and we discovered a powerful connection with audiences in each film that we made. We’re thrilled to collaborate once again with Kevin, Lou and the entire Marvel team to bring this epic adventure in storytelling to new and surprising places for both the fans and ourselves”, said The Russos in a statement after the SDCC panel.

You can check out the full (for now) Doomsday cast list below.

#AvengersDoomsday. Now in production. pic.twitter.com/G84UVU8HOc
— Marvel Studios (@MarvelStudios) March 26, 2025

• Paul Rudd as Ant-Man

• Simu Liu as Shang-Chi

• Tom Hiddleston as Loki

• Lewis Pullman as Sentry

• Florence Pugh as Yelena

• Danny Ramirez as Falcon

• Ian McKellen as Magneto

• Sebastian Stan as Bucky

• Winston Duke as M’Baku

• Chris Hemsworth as Thor

• Kelsey Grammer as Beast

• James Marsden as Cyclops

• Channing Tatum as Gambit

• Wyatt Russell as U.S. Agent

• Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm

• Rebecca Romijn as Mystique

• Patrick Stewart as Professor X

• Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler

• Letitia Wright as Black Panther

• Tenoch Huerta Mejia as Namor

• Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards

• Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost

• Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm

• David Harbour as Red Guardian

• Robert Downey Jr as Doctor Doom

• Ebon Moss-Bachrach as The Thing

• Anthony Mackie as Captain America

Michael Waldron Reveals Which AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY And SECRET WARS Character Has Been Most Fun To Write

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33 Comments

bobevanz - 10/29/2025, 10:37 AM

Ah, it's so easy to make up whatever this moron wants and passes it off as a rumor. No way to validate anything this ditz says. Carte Blanche for clicks

HelloBoysImBack - 10/29/2025, 11:01 AM

@bobevanz - cope and cry more you nazi fascist incel transphone islamaphone bigot racist misogynist

Bucky74 - 10/29/2025, 11:39 AM

@HelloBoysImBack - Lol, somebody missed their meds today.

PatchesOhulihan - 10/29/2025, 12:43 PM

@HelloBoysImBack - Is a transphone a home phone that thinks its a cell phone?

Well try all you want, that home phone is still a home phone, no matter if it cuts off its cord and dresses like a cell. Do you really think that phone can make any actual calls once it leaves the house?? Yeah I didn't think so. Not fooling anyone.

I chuckled a bit too much writing this....

HelloBoysImBack - 10/29/2025, 1:24 PM

@Bucky74 - that's the left for you

Spike101 - 10/29/2025, 10:39 AM

Even more messy, and pray to complicated for the general cinema audience unless they had read years of comics. Unlikely to have appealed to many people.

MaximusTheMad - 10/29/2025, 10:41 AM

Wack.

Young Avengers as a concept is wack too.

Marvel's best young heroes have always been X-Men.

Bucky74 - 10/29/2025, 11:39 AM

@MaximusTheMad - Agreed. Keep them as a Disney plus series if they want but general audiences don’t want the “Young Avengers” as they only serve to water down the franchise.

soberchimera - 10/29/2025, 10:41 AM

Nathaniel Richards has ALWAYS been Kang, the variants are Immortus, Rama-Tut, Scarlet Centurion, Iron Lad, etc from different points in Richards’ life.

MarkCassidy - 10/29/2025, 10:45 AM

@soberchimera - Ok... I didn't know much about the character when I researched. So he is THE Kang the Conqueror? What's all the stuff about the 6311 version becoming Kang?

MarkCassidy - 10/29/2025, 10:46 AM

@MarkCassidy - At any rate, the Kang we met in the MCU clearly wasn't supposed to be Nate Richards.

gmit92 - 10/29/2025, 10:53 AM

@MarkCassidy - I don’t agree with that though. Kang is always Nathaniel Richards.

Obviously we’ll never know since now the plan is Doom but when they announced Kang as a villain, then started setting up Young Avengers (young Nathaniel is Iron Lad, his experiences with that team directly lead to him becoming Kang after the death of…Cassie Lang, heavily featured in Quantumania which starred…adult Kang) and Fantastic Four (likely setting up his ancestors, Reed Richard’s AND Doctor Doom).

I fully believe the plan was exploring more of Nathaniel’s life, hero and villain.

But the main Kang in the comics is always Nathaniel/Nate

soberchimera - 10/29/2025, 10:55 AM

@MarkCassidy - He’s a very convoluted character, but the Victor Timely stuff from the Loki show was created for the show. Kang in the comics is the 31st century descendant of Reed Richards who traveled back in time at various points to take over. He was NOT some studdering inventor from the early 1900s.

OmegaBlack13 - 10/29/2025, 10:59 AM

@soberchimera @MarkCassidy - Yeah, in the comics Victor Timely was just a weird side thing they found him doing in the 1800s for a little while.

soberchimera - 10/29/2025, 11:00 AM

@OmegaBlack13 - Yeah true, Victor Timely is in the comics, but he was still Nathaniel Richards and he wasn’t born in that time.

MarkCassidy - 10/29/2025, 11:02 AM

@soberchimera - Gothcha... ok I'll make some edits 😂

CreateNowSlpL8r - 10/29/2025, 11:09 AM

@MarkCassidy - The problem in the MCU is they changed him to a multiverse traveler. So in the comics, Nathaniel Richards is Kang. In the MCU, HWR mentions a brillient scientist from the future discovered other universes. As soon as they did that, Kang's origin was changed so its confusing. The Victor Timely thing was implied (I think) that Victor's destiny was altered with future info which contradicts everything. When they changed Victor's destiny at the end of S2, it implies he will not become a Kang.

Think of it this way, the variants in the MCU are just different version of the same Nathaniel Richards, just at different points of time. If you watched the CW Flash show, they had time remnants which were copies of Barry resulting from time traveling. The Councel of Kangs is similar. When prime Kang finds out about them, he manipulates them because of course he thinks they are lesser than him.

@soberchimera

soberchimera - 10/29/2025, 11:19 AM

@CreateNowSlpL8r - They should’ve just kept him as a guy from the future with advanced technology, general audiences cab wrap their heads around that pretty easily.

CreateNowSlpL8r - 10/29/2025, 11:42 AM

@soberchimera - Yep for sure. Hes a great villain. The animated cartoon EMH did him pretty well. The main thing that gets him is his hubris. THe comics are confusing too because they change the past and change who he becomes so many times. They should have just established Kang the conquerer, then went from there. You could have just had him in Avengers 5, then grow it from there. They were stuck with their time travel rules from Endgame which boxed them in forever. At some point, they need to retcon that. At first the TVA was a macguffin because they wanted to bring Loki back. So just saying we prune all these universes made it clean. Thats why they had to back in the "avengers were supposed to go back in time." to explain why they werent prunned. Even then, you can dissect Endgame to find other universes that were created. Like did they clean up the universe where they lost? They were pretty explicit that changing the past doesnt change the future so the end of endgame should be a new universe unless HWR stiched them together.

WHat a mess. The back to the future rules are simple for a reason lol.

soberchimera - 10/29/2025, 11:57 AM

@CreateNowSlpL8r - EMH Kang understood what made the character tick without making him overly complicated.

TheVisionary25 - 10/29/2025, 10:54 AM

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Kang the descendant of Nathaniel Richards’s who just has the same name as him in the comics and not actually a version of Reed’s dad?.

Anyway , I think the idea Waldron & Loveness pitched is funny (and feels very Rick & Morty imo) but I would hope it wasn’t the way the actual main villain was defeated…

If the thought was that various teams would taking on their own Kang variants then I think this could have worked since you could do a gag amongst the other ones that would hopefully be taken more seriously.

MGSSnake1988 - 10/29/2025, 10:56 AM

Choosing Kang as the original big bad of the Multiverse Saga is probably a last-minute decision by Marvel for the following reasons:

1. James Gunn, who is supposed to flesh out the cosmic side of the MCU, was poached by Warner Bros. in 2019 and his plans were scrapped;
2. Most of the creative teams were given free reign to do what they want;
3. The Fox merger gave them too much material to work om; and
4. They saw Jonathan Majors' performances in Loki season 1 and Quantumania, and decided to pick the character without building a solidified plan while not making preparations to include Kang in other MCU projects.

Curious in how The Kang Dynasty will be received when released last May 2025, after seeing Kang lose to Asgardians and ants.

bkmeijer1 - 10/29/2025, 11:12 AM

@MGSSnake1988 - Kang always made sense to me as the next villain after Endgame, just not as an overarching villain for a whole saga.

The way I see it, it would've made the most sense to do:
Phase 4 - Avengers Kang: Dynasty (2022)
Phase 5 - Thunderbolts (2025)
Phase 6 - Avengers: Secret Wars Part 1 & 2 (2028/2029)

Vigor - 10/29/2025, 11:31 AM

@bkmeijer1 - this makes the most sense. Although I'd have made secret invasion a bigger thing (maybe the captain marvel 2 movie) and had that be the phase 4 ender. Kang dynasty for phase 5 ending. And thunderbolts kicks off phase 6 and lead up to secret wars

MGSSnake1988 - 10/29/2025, 11:41 AM

@bkmeijer1 - The problem with MCU Kang is his lack of appearances im Phases Four and Five to make the general audiences fear the rest of his variants throught films and a couple of TV shows instead of including them all in a MCU film's post-credits scene.

Three appearances in, he is defeated by Asgardians and advanced ants. As a result, only a few people took him seriously as a threat to the Avengers.

Loved those ideas, though they only filmed Quantumania during 2021 and there are no plans to don Avengers films at that time.

MGSSnake1988 - 10/29/2025, 11:45 AM

@Vigor - Those bits of Kree sleeper cells and Skrulls infiltrating Earth teased in Spider-Man: Far From Home are all wasted in a TV show.

Vigor - 10/29/2025, 11:47 AM

@MGSSnake1988 - I know and it frustrates me so much. I feel ill when I think of what secret invasion should have beeen

MGSSnake1988 - 10/29/2025, 11:51 AM

@Vigor - Two showrunners did it apparently, and the series is supposed to be set after Captain Marvel 2.

All the reamining goodwill Captain Marvel 2 had, and the film ignoring the series meant no more Skrulls in the next cpuple of years.

bkmeijer1 - 10/29/2025, 11:07 AM

Well yeah, that's Kang's name. If it was a variant, Iron Lad would've made the most sense

TheVisionary25 - 10/29/2025, 11:16 AM

@bkmeijer1 - though Iron Lad is a good guy?.

JFerguson - 10/29/2025, 11:12 AM

Still hoping The Beyonder shows up in secret wars, whether it’s played by Majors or otherwise. Actually RDJ as beyonder would have made more sense than him as Doom

dragon316 - 10/29/2025, 11:46 AM

They should not have begun with variant crap non comic fans may not know what’s going they watch all stuff to understand what variants are different universe should have stuck with time travel

Goldboink - 10/29/2025, 12:58 PM

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RUMOR: The Kang Variant The Young Avengers Were Going To Defeat In THE KANG DYNASTY Was Nathaniel Richards

Following writer Michael Waldron's recent comments about pitching an idea for Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, a new rumor may reveal exactly which variant of Kang the Young Avengers were going to defeat...

Michael Waldron Reveals Which AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY And SECRET WARS Character Has Been Most "Fun" To Write

5 Kang Doctor Doom Variants We Could See In AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY (And Beyond...)

DISCLAIMER: As a user generated site and platform, Comic Book Movie is protected under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) and "Safe Harbor" provisions.

Michael Waldron Reveals Which AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY And SECRET WARS Character Has Been Most "Fun" To Write

5 Kang Doctor Doom Variants We Could See In AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY (And Beyond...)