Marvel Star Michael Douglas Wanted Hank Pym to Die in Last Ant-Man Movie
"Now, I don't think I'm going to show up," the Ant-Man actor says of future Marvel movies.
Michael Douglas wanted Hank Pym to buy the (ant) farm in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The first film of Marvel's Phase 5 saw the Ant-fam — Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), and her parents Hank and Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) — travel into the Quantum Realm, the domain of the exiled time lord Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors). At one point, Pym's former protégé-turned-Kang crony Darren Cross/M.O.D.O.K. (Corey Stoll) crashed his old mentor's ship, but Pym was saved by his ant army that ultimately helped defeat Kang.
Douglas appeared on The View on Tuesday to promote his new Apple TV series Franklin, where he expanded on previous comments about wanting the Marvel Cinematic Universe to kill off Hank Pym in a potential fourth Ant-Man movie.
"This actually was my request for the third one," Douglas said. "I said I'd like to have a serious [death], with all these great special effects. There's got to be some fantastic way where I can shrink to an ant size and explode, whatever it is. I want to use all those effects. But, that was on the last one. Now, I don't think I'm going to show up."
Ant-Man 3 screenwriter Jeff Loveness revealed in a past interview that Douglas almost got his wish: in one version of the script, Pym would have died but have his consciousness survive in his telepathically-controlled army of ants.
"We were going to kill Hank at one point, and I was going to have him be, like, reanimated," Loveness told Backstory Magazine. "His consciousness was going to live on through the ants, and he was going to be like mentally controlling them. Yeah, he was going to be almost like this hive mind of the ants, and I like that... that didn't go too far."
Douglas debuted as Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, in the original 2015 film and reprised his role in the 2018 sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp. The third — and possibly final — Ant-Man movie disappointed at the box office, with Quantumania sizing up $476 million worldwide against a reported $275 million budget.
Marvel's Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is streaming on Disney+.