The Ant-Man series is one of Marvel Studios’ lower-profile movie franchises. Both Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp rank amongst the lowest-grossing MCU movies, though the characters were both warmly received in Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame.
All this makes Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania something to look forward to. The story will round out Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly’s trilogy, will likely set up a new hero in Cassie Lang, and will be Bill Murray’s first (and, by his own admission, last) MCU movie.
Now, Lilly has spoken to The Digital Fix about how the shoot went and what the movie looks like. Her first response was to underline the difficulty of making a movie during a pandemic:
“We finished filming at the end of November, and I think, hands down, it was the hardest one we’ve made. It was the most difficult. It was the only one we’ve made during the Covid lockdowns. That just adds such an incredible complication to making a movie. It adds a lot of stress. It makes things very impersonal because you can’t see faces.”
But it seems adversity breeds excellence, with Lilly saying it should be the high point of the trilogy:
“Film sets are already impersonal enough, there is so much that goes on and so much that has to get done in a short amount of time, and the intensity level is really, really high. So it was a very trying experience doing the film with Covid measures. But I actually think…what we did, the stuff we shot, the material we managed to get, I think it might be the best one yet.”
There are a lot of questions swirling around this movie that I’m eager to get answers to. We know Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror is the movie’s villain, but how does the character, first introduced in Loki, get wrapped up in a story involving the Quantum Realm? There’s also the question of who Bill Murray be playing, with some assuming he might be an older version of Rudd’s Scott Lang.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania isn’t out until July 28, 2023, so we have a wait to find out, but I think chances are good one of the post-credit scenes in this year’s MCU movies will point the way forward.