With the release of the second trailer for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Phase 5 of the MCU is just around the corner. Marvel is stepping up the push toward 2025’s Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. It’s right there in the trailer and everything.
On the surface, it may not seem as though Quantumania is the Marvel movie with the power to jumpstart the Multiverse Saga. Neither of the previous two Ant-Man movies were hugely important in terms of the larger MCU. As the official start of Phase 5 and the first movie to feature Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror, Quantumania just may be what the MCU needs to regain its momentum.
Let’s take a closer look at why Quantumania is shaping up to be far more than just another Ant-Man sequel, and why the Multiverse Saga will finally start to coalesce around Marvel’s tiniest superhero family.
Meeting Kang the Conqueror
Quantumania’s biggest selling point is clearly the fact that it features the first film appearance of Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror. Majors previously appeared as another version of Kang – the kooky time hermit known as He Who Remains – in the Loki: Season 1 finale, but this will be our first taste of the classic incarnation of this major Marvel villain. Presumably, this is the Kang who will go on to play a recurring role across the MCU in the build-up to 2025’s Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.
That makes Quantumania a very important piece of the larger puzzle that is the Multiverse Saga. The previous two Ant-Man movies featured relatively small-scale conflicts and villains seeking personal gain rather than world domination. But in Kang, we have a character who sees himself as the rightful ruler of time itself. Quantumania will surely reveal much more about what his long-term goals are and how it all connects to the Quantum Realm that’s been such a key fixture of this series.
Kang is clearly meant to be The Multiverse Saga’s answer to Thanos. But the key difference is that we’re going to see a lot more of Kang in the lead-up to The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars than we ever did of Thanos pre-Infinity War. He Who Remains already had more screen time in Loki than Thanos did in the entirety of Phases 1 and 2. We’ll no doubt meet at least one other version of Kang in Loki: Season 2, and there’s room for even more Kang in future projects like Fantastic Four.
All of this proves that Quantumania is pivotal to the MCU in a way neither of its predecessors were. If you felt Phase 4 was lacking in direction or forward momentum, hopefully that won’t be an issue much longer.
Scott Lang and the Devil’s Bargain
In the aftermath of Endgame, the MCU has mostly divided its attention between establishing new heroes and exploring how the old guard are navigating a post-Blip MCU. Quantumania looks to be tackling a bit of both. The first trailer focuses a lot on Scott Lang enjoying his newfound celebrity, but we also know his daughter Cassie will be suiting up as Stature for the first time. In fact, Quantumania is the first MCU movie to focus on three generations of heroes, as Hank Pym and the recently freed Janet van Dyne are also key players.
In many ways, Quantumania looks to crystallize the big themes of Phase 4. After you’ve saved the literal universe from annihilation, where do you go next? How can a younger generation hope to live up to that impossible example? And how can heroes who were robbed of five years of time with their loved ones recover what was lost?
That last question seems to be at the heart of Scott’s character arc in Quantumania. This is a father who’s missed out on huge portions of his daughter’s childhood, whether because he was imprisoned or because time moved on while he was trapped in the Quantum Realm. One of the most heartbreaking moments in the MCU comes as Scott returns home to a Snap-ravaged San Francisco and sees an almost unrecognizable Cassie answer the door.
How can heroes who were robbed of five years of time with their loved ones recover what was lost?
In the first Quantumania trailer, Kang tells Scott, “I can get you back home, and give you more time… if you help me.” The second trailer is even more explicit about what Kang wants. He’s offering Scott a chance to go back in time and experience those missing years with Cassie, in exchange for the secret of escaping the Quantum Realm and helping Kang return to the regular world. Having already saved the universe through the power of time travel, just how tempted will Scott be to accept that Faustian bargain?
We’re guessing pretty tempted. Several shots in the second trailer show Scott splitting into multiple versions of himself, some sort of time travel side effect that’s no doubt Kang’s handiwork.
And it’s not as if Scott is the only character dealing with that profound loss. Janet missed out on decades of life with her husband and daughter. Everyone in the Ant-Fam has missed out on precious time – time that only Kang has the power to restore.
With Kang poised to play such a major role in the Multiverse Saga, this dynamic could even be a taste of things to come in Phases 5 and 6. Will Kang make similar offers to other heroes? What happens when Bruce Banner is tempted with the chance to undo his transformation into Hulk, or Thor to save Asgard from Ragnarok? What if Kang borrows a page from Mephisto in Spider-Man: One More Day and offers Peter Parker a chance to save Aunt May?
This could wind up being a key plot point in The Kang Dynasty. Perhaps what makes Kang such a formidable threat isn’t the fact that he has all the resources of the future at his beck and call, but that the Avengers are reluctant to fight him at all.
MODOK and the Quantum Realm
We’ve seen glimpses of the Quantum Realm in previous Ant-Man movies and Endgame, but Quantumania promises to deliver a much more in-depth look at this bite-sized universe. It’s all very Star Wars in look and feel. Quantumania will make the MCU a fundamentally bigger place by revealing the world that exists between the fabric of our own.
That’s a significant change from the comics, where the Quantum Realm is known as the Microverse. The Microverse has been the setting of many stories over the years, but it’s never been as pivotal to the larger Marvel Universe as the Quantum Realm is becoming to the MCU.
Nor is Kang the only important new inhabitant of the Quantum Realm to be introduced in this sequel. We’re also going to meet MODOK, the giant-brained science experiment who’s been a thorn in the side of the Avengers for decades. He’s a major villain in his own right, and he might just pave the way for the MCU to tackle a more comics-inspired version of the science terrorist organization AIM (as opposed to the version seen in Iron Man 3).
We’ll see what, if any, role MODOK has in the MCU’s future, but we do learn one important detail in the second trailer. We see MODOK unmasked in a couple of shots around the 0:57 mark. If you look closely, you can see that MODOK is played by Corey Stoll, which seems to confirm this villain is actually a mutated Darren Cross from the original Ant-Man movie. When last we saw Cross in the climax of that film, he was trapped inside the Yellowjacket suit as it shrunk down to subatomic size. He didn’t die, but he’s definitely not entirely human anymore.
There are also actors cast in the sequel whose characters haven’t been confirmed yet. Bill Murray is playing someone with ties to Michelle Pfeiffer’s Janet (with many speculating he’s her ex-boyfriend), and The Good Place’s William Jackson Harper is also appearing. Either one of these characters could turn out to be more important to the Multiverse Saga than we know.
That’s to say nothing of the other characters and cameos Marvel is keeping under wraps. Who – or what – else is hiding in the Quantum Realm? What other iconic Marvel characters could be introduced as our heroes venture deeper into this microscopic universe? One popular fan theory is that Quantumania will set the stage for the Fantastic Four, perhaps revealing that they were an older generation of heroes lost in the Quantum Realm much like Janet herself. Anything is possible with a sandbox this large.
Are you excited for Kang the Conqueror’s big screen debut? Just how important will Quantumania be to the MCU’s Multiverse Saga? Let us know your theories in the comments below. And for more on the MCU, brush up on what to expect from Marvel in 2023.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
