‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ Director Teases the Quantum Realm’s Importance to the MCU

Ant-Man introduced the Quantum Realm, known as the Microverse in Marvel Comics, into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Ant-Man and the Wasp explores that concept further, but Marvel fans shouldn’t expect the Quantum Realm’s significance in the MCU to end there.

Ant-Man and the Wasp director Peyton Reed told The Hollywood Reporter a bit about how the Quantum Realm made it into Ant-Man, and what future it may have in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“The Quantum Realm didn’t exist in Edgar [Wright] and Joe’s [Cornish] original drafts,” Reed says. “When [Adam] McKay came on, McKay and Rudd were writing drafts, and McKay also is a big comics nerd. McKay and I were talking about the Microverse. In a movie that had a lot of shrinking, it’d be great to figure out a thing in the third act that for the purposes of that story was almost a cautionary tale. If you turn off the regulator. It allowed us to give Scott Lang his moment of self-sacrifice, where he was going to potentially kill himself to save his daughter. It also occurred to us that we all love that sort of psychedelic side of the Marvel Universe. It’s the Microverse in the comics that we re-named the Quantum Realm for copyright reasons.

“It was never a mandate [from Feige], but it was, ‘this would be really cool.’ Also, visually it was really fun. It just happened to make absolute sense for the third act of our first movie. … I think Kevin has this large vision for what the MCU can be, and I know he definitely has a vision for what specific things he ultimately wants to see in it, but there is an awful lot of give and take with the individual filmmakers and stories that feed into that thing.”

In a separate interview, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige teased the future use of the Quantum Realm himself.

“There are things that you see back there that Peyton has put in there,” Feige teased. “Where and how they pay off in the near term and the long term remains to be seen. “

Ant-Man and the Wasp opens in theaters on July 6th.

Avengers: Infinity War is now playing in theaters. Other upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe movies include Captain Marvel on March 8, 2019, the fourth Avengers movie on May 3, 2019, Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5th, 2019, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in 2020.