Is [Spoiler] really dead? Who’s that in the credits scene? Is Ant Man 4 coming soon? The director of “Quantumania” in an interview

To mark the theatrical release of “Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania,” we spoke not only to Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Kathryn Newton, and Jonathan Majors, but also to Peyton Reed, who is here for the third time an “Ant-Man Man” movie staged. And of course we took the opportunity to ask the director all the questions we (and many others) had after the film ended:

Is Kang the Conqueror really dead as it appears at the end of the movie? Who are all the other kangs in the mid-credit scene and what do they want? And are he and Kevin Feige really already working on Ant-Man 4, as Quantumania producer Stephen Broussard said?

Peyton Reed: I wanted to do something new when we do a third Ant-Man movie. I wanted to take Ant-Man and The Wasp out of their familiar environment. After the events of Avengers: Endgame, Scott Lang rests on his laurels for a while. And I felt like we owed the public an answer about what the quantum realm is like and what Janet has been doing there for 30 years.

It also felt like a really logical place to meet Kang the Conqueror. He’s there for a very specific reason, which is because he was banished. And it also made sense thematically, because Kang is a villain who can control time and Scott has always had an ambivalent relationship with time. What drives him is that he wants to spend more time with his daughter, but something always gets in the way. We loved the idea of ​​the hero and villain having a rocky time relationship.

Kang is a Nexus creature.

Peyton Reed: Unfortunately I can’t answer this question, for that you would have to speak to the person making this movie: Our screenwriter Jeff Loveness is currently working on “Avengers 5: The Kang Dynasty”.

But what we liked about Kang: He’s a Nexus creature [ein sehr mächtiges Wesen, das in jeder einzelnen Parallelwelt des Marvel-Multiversums existiert]. There are many variants of him. We met whoever stayed at the end of Loki and at the end of our movie there’s this scene with the Kang council and all the politics behind it.

Rama Tut, Immortus & Centurion

Peyton Reed: There is a version of Rama-Tut, a variant that has some kind of bionic mechanical enhancements. There is immortality. And there is Centurion. In the comics I believe his name is Scarlet Centurion.

Peyton Reed: He’s just a variant of Centurion. We wanted to present a quick-to-understand scene featuring a Privy Council, a triumvirate of very powerful Kang variants.

And we wanted to talk about what it means that Kang is the Conqueror from the game. What effect does this have on the other kangs, on the council of kangs? And what does it mean that heroes like Spider-Man and Doctor Strange are slowly becoming aware of the existence of the multiverse? Naturally, this is a threat to the Kangs, who have always felt they control the multiverse. We wanted to capture that dynamic in a nutshell.

Peyton Reed: I have a soft spot for the slightly wacky villains. We have already talked about the Rama Tut variant. I like the idea of ​​Jonathan Majors playing Rama-Tut in ancient Egypt in a dramatic movie. He just went back in time, holed up there and enjoys his hedonistic life. He always shows up when he’s needed, he’s a mighty warrior after all, but most of the time he’s just sitting around drinking wine and stuff.

Is Ant Man 4 coming soon?

Peyton Reed: [lacht] Stephen called me after this interview and said maybe he gave too much away. Of course, when we thought about what we’d like to do in this movie, there were a lot of great ideas that didn’t fit anymore and we said, maybe in another movie sometime in the future. So it’s still early, but it could be fun.

Peyton Reed: We just wanted to create a living quantum realm. Janet describes it in the film as worlds within worlds. We wanted to do it differently than outer space in Guardians of the Galaxy or Asgard in the Thor movies, but create our own subatomic world. How does it look? What creatures live there?

Every time you create such a fantastic world there are certain landmarks, be it Star Wars, Dune or Flash Gordon, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or Moebius. But most of all, we wanted to give our talented artists the chance to open up their drawing portfolios and try out crazy ideas. Things that have never fit before, but maybe on a quantum level. Jeff Loveness and the concept artists worked a lot together on this.

Peyton Reed: That was one of the exciting things we inherited from Avengers: Endgame: Scott lost another five years with his daughter and she’s now 18, though Scott feels like she’s a little girl and not a young woman with a mind of her own .

In an early draft of the script, we considered making a sort of montage that shows what Cassie’s been up to all these five years: she’s trying to learn more about why her father disappeared, which would lead her to Hank Pym’s house. have led. Then she would have broken in and discovered Hank’s diaries, which she uses to teach herself quantum technology, as she is obsessed with trying to save her father.

This is also alluded to in the basement scene at the beginning of the film. But in the end, we felt like we could tell it in the present tense, without flashbacks. It was just one of those elements that we thought about during development and wanted to shoot, but then we decided against it.

Peyton Reed: At the start of production you naturally think of everything. But then you find the core of the movie, the characters, and you get to a point where you realize there’s only so much the movie can hold. We found that the story of Luis and Co. was complete.

But David Dastmalchian is kind of my lucky charm, I can’t do an Ant Man movie without David. So I really wanted to bring David back as a different character and that’s how we ended up with Veb, a really cute little character who’s very curious about Scott Lang. David is a great actor and has his fingers on everything: Marvel, DC, Dune…

“Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania” is in German cinemas since February 15, 2023.