‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ Was Inspired by a Barbra Streisand Movie

Marvel Studios' latest action-adventure comedy Ant-Man and the Wasp looked to 1972 Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal-led romantic comedy What's Up, Doc? for inspiration, director Peyton Reed told The Washington Post.

"I actually screened What's Up, Doc? when we were prepping the movie," Reed said. "I saw it as a kid and loved it."

The San Francisco-set screwball comedy sees a mix-up over identical overnight bags and features a big chase scene through the streets of the Golden City — two elements also present in Ant-Man and the Wasp.

In What's Up, Doc?, rival parties careen through steep San Francisco hills, their race ending in the waters of the bay, not too dissimilar from one of the bigger set pieces seen in Ant-Man and the Wasp (but with the addition of shrinking and overgrowing superpowers).

That 1972 comedy drew upon "the specificity of San Francisco as a character in the movie," Reed said, adding of the chase scene, "it uses the really specific topography of that city and specific landmarks."

Instead of a Beetle automobile ending up in the Bay, it's Ant-Man (Scott Lang) — more specifically, Giant-Man — who ends up in the drink.

"There's also that MacGuffin in that movie of all those different [travel] cases," Reed said of the overnight bag switcheroo. "And of course, we have our [shrinkable] building that changes hands."

"We toyed around early on, when we were designing the action scene, for several weeks we had [visualized] that giant pane-of-glass gag," Reed said of a gag in Doc where two workers are seen lifting a clear pane of glass while crossing the street, narrowly avoiding a bicycle, cars, and a taxi cab — until a nearby worker is toppled from his ladder, smashing into and shattering the pane-of-glass.

Doc "was one of the big ones that we watched and said: 'There should be a bit of What's Up, Doc? in [our] movie,'" Reed said.

The comedic and romantic chemistry between Streisand and O'Neal informed a similar relationship between Rudd's Scott Lang and Evangeline Lilly's Hope van Dyne, the sometimes-lovers who find themselves often at odds in Ant-Man and the Wasp because of Scott's actions in Captain America: Civil War.

The crime-fighting team next return in Avengers 4, out May 3.