Like its titular size-shrinking superheroes, Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is going bigger — and smaller. Director Peyton Reed joined his Ant-Man 3 stars Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Kathryn Newton, and Jonathan Majors at San Diego Comic-Con to tease his follow-up to 2015’s Ant-Man and 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, bringing the first footage from the threequel to Hall H. Post-Avengers: Endgame, Earth’s mightiest heroes-turned-celebrities Scott Lang (Rudd) and Hope van Dyne (Lilly) are drawn back into the Quantum Realm to thwart a plot involving a villainous duo: M.O.D.O.K. and twisted timelord Kang the Conqueror (Majors).
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“We were thrilled to get to do a third Ant-Man movie and do a trilogy,” Reed told EW. “And we knew if we were going to do that we wanted to do some things differently. We really wanted to take a hard left turn and make a movie that was even more epic, but still progress the story of these family dynamics and everything that’s going on between Scott and Hope and Cassie.”
After going missing in the Quantum Realm for five years in between the events of Ant-Man and the Wasp and Endgame, Scott is trying to reconnect with his now 18-year-old daughter, Cassie (Newton).
“Cassie is now 18 years old and maybe Scott doesn’t quite know how to relate to her as an adult because he lost those five years because of the events of Endgame,” Reed said. “And we also knew that we wanted to put our heroes up against a very, very formidable opponent. I grew up reading the comics, and I knew the character of Kang the Conqueror, who’s one of the big, big bad characters in the comics, so to be able to put up our heroes against Kang the Conqueror was a huge thing for us. We went big and we also went small.”
Read More: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania First Look Revealed at SDCC • Kang the Conqueror, Explained • First Ant-Man 3 Trailer Teases M.O.D.O.K. and Bill Murray
In the teaser trailer that screened exclusively for the Comic-Con crowd, Scott crosses paths with Kang — a variant of He Who Remains, who was revealed to be pulling the strings of the Time Variance Authority in the Marvel Studios series Loki.
“You’re an interesting man, Scott Lang,” Kang tells Ant-Man. “You’ve lost a lot of time. But time, it isn’t what you think.” (Majors is expected to reprise the role of Kang in the two-part Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars, announced at Comic-Con as the conclusion to The Multiverse Saga.)
“We knew the scope of this thing was going to be different; we’re going up against Kang, which adds in a whole other element,” Rudd told EW. “Cassie is now older. There are things we got to explore and re-live from the first two films, but this was going to be a whole new thing — and it felt like it shooting it.”
Quantumania reunites the original Ant-Man and Wasp — Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) — for a mission into the Quantum Realm, where Bill Murray will join the Marvel Cinematic Universe as an as-yet-unrevealed character.
“We finally get to spend some time in the quantum realm,” Reed said on stage in Hall H. “We have a lot in store for these characters in this movie, and we’re going to meet a lot of new characters in this movie and explore the Quantum Realm, which is not always what you think it is, so we’re really really excited to bring it to life.”
Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania opens in theaters on July 28, 2023.
