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Saturday Night Live returning with Marvel breakouts Jonathan Majors & Simu Liu as hosts
Jonathan Majors and Simu Liu are going from the MCU to 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Live from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it's Saturday night! NBC announced Tuesday that a pair of breakout Marvel stars — Jonathan Majors and Simu Liu — have been chosen as hosts for upcoming November episodes of Saturday Night Live ahead of the show's broadcast return this coming weekend. Just keep your fingers crossed for plenty of Loki and Shang-Chi parodies.
Majors, who appeared as He Who Remains (eccentric founder of the Time Variance Authority and a more benevolent variant of Kang the Conqueror) in the Season 1 finale of Loki on Disney+, will take center stage at 30 Rockefeller Plaza Nov. 13 in his first SNL hosting gig. The accompanying musical guest is Taylor Swift (set to make her fifth appearance).
Majors is all set to make his MCU return as a fully-realized Kang in 2023's Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Now that He Who Remains is dead by Sylvie's hand, his war-mongering selves can continue their crusade to take over the multiverse. The actor is also known for his turn as Atticus Freeman in Lovecraft Country, which was canceled by HBO after a single season.
Simu Liu (star of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), meanwhile, is penciled in for his first-ever hosting duty on Nov. 20 with musical guest Saweetie. Shang-Chi opened in theaters over Labor Day Weekend to a record-setting $90 million domestically. This impressive debut against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic in North America served as a positive sign for other major Hollywood studios hoping for some kind of revitalization of the domestic box office. Sony ended up deciding to move up the release of Venom: Let There Be Carnage by two weeks, leading to another pandemic milestone.
Aside from an end credits assurance that the Ten Rings organization would return (now under the leadership of Shang-Chi's sister, Xu Xialing; played by Meng'er Zhang), Marvel Studios has yet to announce a sequel. A mid-credits sequence featuring cameos from Wong (Benedict Wong), Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), and Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) teased a larger cosmic connection to the titular rings bequeathed to Shang-Chi by his father, Wenwu (Tony Leung).
The film will be available to stream on Disney+ starting Friday, Nov. 12.
Saturday Night Live officially returns to NBC this coming Saturday — Nov. 6 — at 11:30 p.m. ET with first-time host Kieran Culkin (Succession) and third-time musical guest Ed Sheeran. Currently in the middle of its 47th season, the long-running sketch comedy series took a brief hiatus over "Halloweekend."
