As far as summer blockbuster moments go, the concluding genocide of Avengers: Infinity War was a pretty big event that left a lot of viewers in a state of shock as they staggered out of the theater. For Ant-Man and the Wasp director Peyton Reed, the movie proved similarly impactful before the digital effects were even finished.
Speaking to Uproxx, the filmmaker described his initial, startled reaction to the notorious sequence, telling the outlet the following:
“Oh God, when I first saw that moment in Infinity War – in an early cut where the effects weren’t done; I think they were still grayscale effects – it killed me. It was like Saving Private Ryan stuff. It’s like, oh my god, the extended Peter Parker moment was fantastic. I love it.”
After witnessing that dustbath, many Marvel fans found the lighter entertainment of Ant-Man and the Wasp to be a refreshing change of pace, but it was inevitable that Reed’s film would find some way of referencing the consequences of Thanos’ finger-snap.
While the director has gone on record saying that it was never his intention to match the epically grim climax of Infinity War, he did want to catch his viewers off guard, which is what he managed to do with the film’s post-credits sequence. Reed says that he tried to have this scene be as busy as possible, keeping the audience distracted enough to be blindsided by the sight of several characters turning to dust.
“And even in the scene, we introduce all of these elements all at once to the audience. It’s like, oh, this is the first time I’ve seen Janet in street clothes. And they are in a parking lot? And there’s Luis’ van? And Scott in the suit and he’s going to the quantum realm in a shrunken tunnel? So everyone’s mind is on trying to make sense of the stuff at hand, so that hopefully the thing we were ultimately doing wasn’t immediately occurring to them.”
Ant-Man and the Wasp left us on a pretty big cliffhanger, no doubt about it, but hopefully things will all be resolved in a favorable manor when Avengers 4 arrives on May 3rd, 2019.