What You Need To Know Before You Watch Marvel’s ‘Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania’

Marvel’s Ant-Man returns to the big screen as the studio rounds out the hero’s trilogy and kicks off Phase Five in the cinematic universe.

The first two entries, Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp, grossed $519.3 million and $622.7 million at the worldwide box office, respectively. Now, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania lands in theaters and is expected to dominate Presidents Day weekend.

Paul Rudd returns as Scott Lang/Ant-Man along with Evangeline Lilly as Hope van Dyne/Wasp, Michelle Pfeiffer as Janet van Dyne/Wasp, Michael Douglas as Dr. Hank Pym, joined by Kathryn Newton as Cassie Lang and Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror. Peyton Reed is back in the director’s chair.

The morning after the threequel’s world premiere, the ensemble cast and producer and President of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, gathered in Los Angeles to talk to select media at a press conference. Here are some spoiler-free highlights you should check out before heading to theaters.

Family remains at the heart of the story

“The Ant-Man movies have always been about family,” explained director Peyton Reed. “It is a generational story about a family of heroes. Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) wants to be a hero, obviously. He’s an Avenger, but it’s really about work-life balance, and finding time with his daughter is the most important thing. In Quantumania, one of the things we’ve done is broaden that story and start talking about the secrets the family members keep from each other.”

“At the beginning of the movie, very quickly we find out that maybe Janet van Dyne (Pfeiffer) hasn’t told the family about her 30 years in the Quantum Realm, Hope (Lilly) and Hank (Douglas) have not told Scott about what they’re working on with Cassie (Newton) down in the basement, and maybe Cassie hasn’t told her dad about time she might’ve spent in jail. Suddenly, they’re thrust into the Quantum Realm, and they have to work out these family dynamics while being in this bizarro, whacked-out world. The theme of family is a constant in the movies.”

How Scott Lang has evolved

“He really does want to be a dad. He always had a love-hate relationship with it, but now he’s accepted it. Now we get to have a normal life and have some time together, but it doesn’t last as long as he thought it would,” Paul Rudd mused. “Scott’s grown a lot over the course of nine years or so that we’ve been doing these movies. This is a guy who started off with a regular job, then he was brought into this group and had no innate super abilities, but then he went up and fought Thanos. He’s experienced a thing or two and accepted who he is.”

“When we start this movie, it is the present day, and the events of Endgame have already transpired. I wouldn’t say he’s taking a victory lap, but others might say that. He’s written a book, you know, a memoir, look out for the little guy, and he’s explained everything that’s been going on in life and his experiences with the Avengers, but now he is ready to have some time, be a normal dad and there are some issues there because we missed out on a lot. He wants to recapture some of those years.”

Paul Rudd floated the idea of exploring the Quantum Realm years ago

“I was recently reminded that this was an idea that Paul had before we started filming the first Ant-Man film,” recalled Kevin Feige, President of Marvel Studios. “What if we explore quantum mechanics? Things act very differently at the quantum level, and Paul talked about the amount of storytelling, imagination, and fun you could have there. The first Ant-Man movie was mainly about meeting the characters and the origin story, but we got a taste of it at the very end, which is what led to where we took it in Endgame.”

“It is a place that is on the subatomic level where space and time act differently, and that allowed us to time travel at Scott Lang’s suggestion in Endgame and to have this entire manic “quantumness” in this film where we go to a point only Janet had ever seen before. The look was in the works for three and a half years.”

Feige added, “We discussed parallels to The Wizard of Oz a lot in terms of taking and meeting a family down there, but the visuals, which have been in the works for a long time, were all Peyton and his team.”

The complexities of Jonathan Majors’ Kang The Conqueror

“Who is Kang?” asked Jonathan Majors, the actor who portrays the icon bad guy. “I think that is a question we will all be answering for a long time. The quick answer is that Kang is a time-traveling supervillain who is also a nexus being, leading to this idea of variants. There are multiple versions of Kang, versions being variants, and they occupy different multiverses and have different intentions. They are all different beings, and yet something that we’re still working on and continue to refine as a through line between them. That, to me, is the Kang gene. Kang the Conqueror is stuck in the Quantum Realm, and he has some issues with some guys, some variants, and he’s not happy about it.”

“Playing Kang feels like joining the Shakespearean troops back in the day,” he mused. “Shakespeare had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do, and you have your lead actor set the tempo and tone and get busy. The culture of the play and the story is all there, but it’s really changing, so you really have to be very clear about what it is you’re doing and who your character is, what he’s about, what she’s about, what they’re going after, and the rest of it, you play hard. Kang gotta Kang, you know?”

Why Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was the right choice to kick off Phase Five of the MCU

“Phase Four was about introducing a lot of new characters and new heroes to the world. We want to kick off Phase Five with a third film of already beloved characters, which this team certainly is, and utilize them,” Feige explained. “We’ve talked about family, and that goes along with vulnerability and relatability. Who better to face off against one of, if not the biggest villain the MCU has ever faced, than this family who you might think could not handle it? We learn over the course of the movie that Janet has not only handled it but has been dealing with it for decades.”

“In terms of the Ant-Man trilogy, there is a flashback in the first film to the Wasp, the original Wasp, Janet van Dyne, but we don’t see her face. She’s wearing a mask. Our dream was that someday we could make another movie and that Michelle Pfeiffer could play that character. We thankfully got a little more of a taste of it in Ant-Man and the Wasp. There’s a large part of this movie where Peyton and the screenwriters hand the film over to Michelle, and it’s amazing.”

He concluded, “I keep thinking back to those first scenes in the first Ant-Man film where it was a dream and a possibility of who could play this part, but all of these characters, these amazing actors we felt would be a great audience surrogate to meet somebody as complex and scary and multiversal as Kang.”

The creative inspiration for the look of the Quantum Realm?

“We drew from a lot of stuff like Flash Gordon, Barbarella, all these sorts of whacked-out things and looking at the covers of old science fiction paperbacks from the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s,” Reed enthused. “Many great artists would paint the covers for these things, and they would be on a newsstand, and that cover had to grab you, and many of them were creating these bizarre worlds. Heavy Metal magazine had all these artists from all over the world, and they formed this collective, and there’s some just striking imagery in all of that stuff.”

“We also looked at real-world electron microphotography, which takes things that are so incredibly small, and then you print them out, and they look like landscapes. It does set your mind thinking. All of this movie takes place in your fingernail somewhere. This subatomic world has all this stuff going on in the fabric of spacetime outside of space and time but in the quantum realm.”

The director added, “Janet van Dyne describes it at one point as “worlds within worlds” and that there’s this infinite world and worlds down there that are inhabited by creatures and things. When we started going into Marvel and seeing some of those photographs on the wall, I thought, ‘Wow, these are incredible mockups. This is the craziest landscape,’ and they said, ‘No, that’s actually an electron microscope. That is what it looks like.’ When you start thinking, it doesn’t seem like it’s much of an embellishment. It looks insane.”

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is in theaters now