Why 'Ant-Man and the Wasp' doesn't acknowledge events of 'Infinity War' until... (SPOILERS!)
Warning: Major Ant-Man and the Wasp spoilers below.
One of the major questions heading into Ant-Man and the Wasp was how director Peyton Reed and company would handle the standalone film’s events in relation to the seismic events of Marvel’s last blockbuster, Avengers: Infinity War.
If you’ve seen Wasp (and hopefully you have if you’re reading this), you know that the Avengers concurrent battle against Thanos is never actually mentioned amid a contained plot involving Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and the latter’s desperate attempts to recover Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) from the Quantum Realm.
But you know the tie connecting Wasp to the MCU‘s game-changing, casualty-filled battle has to come at some point, and it does, of course, in the film’s end credits. Scott is on what appears to be a routine dive back into the realm to collect quantum energy, when he loses contact with Hope, Hank, and Janet. A cut to the rooftop they’d been operating on reveals they, too, were victims of Thanos’s fatal finger snap.
Infinity War almost had a larger presence in Wasp, though.
“When we were tasked with dealing with this as we were writing the movie, and we went through a bunch of different versions where we’re telling our story and we talked about, ‘Do we start to seed in the events of Infinity War? Are there monitors in the background where we catch a glimpse of these as Easter Eggs?’” Reed tells Yahoo Entertainment in a recent interview (watch above). “That struck us as kind of lame and lazy, and we’ve seen versions of that before.
“We finally ended up with this structure where we resolve all of our storylines in the body of the movie in almost too neat of a bow. And then we have this tag scene that — bam! — hits the audience in a way that they weren’t expecting. So it felt like Ant-Man and the Wasp’s tone and our way to deal with those events.”
Reed says the end-credits scene was originally written by Infinity War scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely before he took over, and the victims there were almost different too.
“We all talked about how it was going to happen, in the most general sense, and to whom it was going to happen,” Reed says. “There was a lot of discussion about how it was going to lay out, and who was going to be there. At one point we talked about … ‘Is Bill Foster [Laurence Fishburne] also there? Is Ava [Hannah John-Kamen] there?
“We had to deal with the percentage issue baked into Infinity War, this 50 percent thing.”
Ant-Man and the Wasp is currently in theaters nationwide.
Watch Peyton Reed explain how they shrank down Paul Rudd:
Read more on Yahoo Entertainment:
