WARNING: The following article has major SPOILERS for Ant-Man and the Wasp, specifically its conclusion and post-credits scene.
So, please, if you haven’t seen the twentieth installment to the Marvel Cinematic Universe bookmark this article, go out and enjoy “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” and then return to read the below.
“Ant-Man and the Wasp” really has two conclusions.
There’s Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) combining to save Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) from the Quantum Realm, where she had been stuck for the last 30 years.
Then, after we see that Scott and Hope have begun to date again, following their unseen, post “Captain America: Civil War” split, the film ends, only for its post-credits scene to then show us Hank, Janet, and Hope sending Scott back into the Quantum Realm to gather research.
Shockingly, though, Janet, Janet, and Hope disintegrate, a result of Thanos using the Infinity Gauntlet at the end of “Avengers: Infinity War,” trapping Scott there.
Since it was following the hugely successful release of “Infinity War,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp” was always going to have to at least mention the shocking conclusion of its predecessor.
During my recent discussion with its co-writer and director Peyton Reed, he admitted as much, too, explaining, “We knew we wanted to deal with ‘Infinity War’ at some point in the movie. That was a big part of the writing process.”
However, it took them a while to figure out when and how to do so. In fact, Reed and his creative team repeatedly wondered, “‘How do we do it? And make it unique to the tone of ‘Ant-Man & Wasp.’ Because, they did that ending in ‘Infinity War.’ We are not gonna out-do that ending. How would the tone of our movie and its characters deal with the specific of that thing?’ So that was a fun thing to sort of figure out.”
“And once we landed on the structure of the finished movie we liked the idea of resolving the stories of our characters and our movies and then rolling the credits and then presenting this credit tag scene, that really kind of, ‘Oh, they’re forwarding the quantum research and everything and then our movie does deal with the end of Infinity War.’ We liked the structure and what it did for the audience.”
