Could the ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ Trailer Hint at the Plot of ‘Avengers 4’?

With the release of Avengers: Infinity War gradually getting closer, fans are eagerly wondering what we can expect next from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But could the trailer for the MCU’s next film after Infinity War, Ant-Man and the Wasp, already have hinted at something that comes next?

The trailer, which was released a few months ago, opens with Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) asking Hope Van Dyne/Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) a question. He wonders if she would have agreed to fight with Scott alongside Team Cap in Captain America: Civil War, to which Hope replies “I guess we’ll never know. But if you had, you’d have never been caught.”

On it’s own, that line feels pretty simple — it reminds viewers of Scott’s last MCU appearance in Civil War, explains Hope’s absence from the film, and catches more casual audiences up on their relationship. But considering the bare minimum of what we know about next year’s Avengers 4, could that line mean something more?

Several set photos and videos have hinted at Avengers 4 revisiting established moments of the MCU, from the Battle of New York in the first Avengers to the Lagos mission in Civil War. The latter of that is particularly interesting, when coupled with a set photo of Lilly sporting her hairstyle from earlier in the MCU, and the comments she made in an interview last year.

“You want me to tell you about the flash-forwards and flashbacks and flash-sideways?” Lilly joked last November. “When I heard about Infinity War [and Avengers 4] and the direction that they’re heading, I did have this moment of realizing, oh, wow, there’s a bit of a déjà vu for me with the Lost franchise. We are hitting that [Lost] Season 4 space where everything’s about to shift, and you’re about to lose the solid ground underneath you. And [Ant-Man and the Wasp], of course, will play a part in that.”

However Avengers 4‘s story unfolds — whether through the flashbacks that Lilly mentioned, or the “BARF” VR technology that the film’s directors have hinted at — it doesn’t seem impossible that the main altercation within Civil War could be revisited in some way. Sure, Robert Downey Jr. essentially argued that they wouldn’t be revisiting the MCU’s greatest hits in Infinity War, but there’s no telling where things could go in the “very different” Avengers 4.

“I read in some magazine that the #1 voted moment was the airport fight in Civil War, because so many of the superheroes [are there],” Downey, who plays Tony Stark/Iron Man, explained earlier this week. “And now that the universe has expanded even more, I think one thing that the creatives always don’t want to do is do a bigger repeat of something that’s already worked well. So without giving anything away, I think that the challenge this time was how do you top or better or expand something, without repeating something that’s already been executed well before.”

Revisiting some of the MCU’s key moments as a necessary part of Avengers 4‘s storyline — and essentially adding new characters into iconic scenes in the process — would certainly be an interesting direction to take the film. And if anything, we already have some hints that that could be happening, with Ant-Man appearing to be present in the “new Battle of New York” scene.

With that in mind, adding Wasp into some sort of sequence from Civil War certainly doesn’t feel impossible. Not only would it slightly retcon Hope’s occasional absence in the MCU — something that fans have had issues with in the past — and would be a pretty impressive payoff for that exchange in the Ant-Man and the Wasp trailer. And who knows? Maybe the current state of the MCU would be very different if Hope had helped Team Cap not get caught.

Avengers: Infinity War lands in theaters on April 27th. Ant-Man and the Wasp follows on July 6th. The still-untitled fourth Avengers premieres on May 3, 2019.