Los Angeles: Shang-Chi: The Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton will be seen helming Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, a representative for Marvel Studios confirmed.
Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige announced The Kang Dynasty during the company’s wide-ranging presentation at San Diego Comic-Con, as part one of the two-part conclusion to the Multiverse Saga -similar to how 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War and 2019’s Avengers: Endgame concluded the Infinity Saga, reports Variety’.
Unlike those films, which were filmed and directed back-to-back by MCU veterans Anthony and Joe Russo, Cretton will only be directing The Kang Dynasty, which is set to debut May 2, 2025.
The follow-up, Avengers: Secret Wars, is due to open just six months later, November 7, 2025. No director has been announced for that film.
While there have been no screenwriter or casting announcements for The Kang Dynasty either, the title makes clear that Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror who will be first introduced in 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, will play a central role in the film.
As his name suggests, Kang did indeed successfully conquer Earth in a Marvel comics run in the early 2000s, until the Avengers defeated him.
Shang-Chi was the first Marvel Studios film to get an exclusive theatrical release following the Covid pandemic shutdown, earning $432 million worldwide amid rolling shutdowns during the spread of the delta variant.
Prior to that film, Cretton was best known as the director of the deeply felt 2013 indie drama Short Term 12, which helped to launch the career of its star Brie Larson all the way to playing Captain Marvel in the MCU.
Larson has since appeared in all of Cretton’s movies, starring in the 2017 biographical drama The Glass Castle, and co-starring with Michael B. Jordan, also an MCU veteran, in Warner Bros.’ 2019 historical drama Just Mercy.
