Warning: Spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to follow.
With its opening weekend having come and gone, it doesn’t look like the bleak sentiment surrounding Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania will be improving any time soon. Indeed, barring an inch-perfect performance from Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror (who, frankly, needed all the gravitas Majors could muster given how the character met his defeat), it seems that Scott Lang’s third outing has all the parts it needs to cement itself as one of the worst-reviewed MCU projects in history.
But who was the biggest loser of Quantumania? Kang and his apparently poor matchup against technocratic insects? M.O.D.O.K., the floating, talking personification of dramatic dissonance? Audiences, if we’re being ruthlessly honest?
No, if there was any character that Quantumania did a disservice to more than anyone, it was Cassie Lang.
Cassie, for the most part, is a character that the MCU has treated with reckless abandon from the get-go, as prophesized by the bizarre decision to recast Emma Fuhrmann, who first portrayed a grown-up Cassie in Avengers: Endgame, even after she delivered a masterclass of a reunion scene with Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang.
Of course, that isn’t to say that Kathryn Newton, who will be helming the role of Cassie from here on out, is to blame for Quantumania dropping the ball on her. Given the script that she seemed forced to work with coupled with her status as an MCU newcomer, no one can reasonably blame her for getting trapped the way she did.
So why was Cassie the biggest loser of Quantumania? Well, one just has to turn to the film’s ending to begin answering that question.
How Quantumania should have ended
Marvel missed a glittering, gorgeous opportunity to launch Cassie into one of the most fascinating character arcs we could have ever seen, and threw it away for the sake of a safe, Hollywood-friendly ending, in which Scott, on the brink of being beaten beyond recovery by Kang, is rescued by Hope van Dyne, and the two of them knock Kang into the power core, seemingly sending him to his death. With the day saved and everyone happy and healthy, Scott and the rest of the Ant-Man family return to their world for a fake birthday surprise for Cassie.
On the surface, and barring the fact that it quickly turned Kang into a laughingstock, perhaps there’s nothing wrong with this ending. But, if one were to tap into their imagination just a little bit, it doesn’t take long to arrive at how the film should have ended, and how opting out of such an ending for the sake of the one we got in the film made for a major missed opportunity for Cassie’s character.
Recently, a thread on r/MCUTheories led to a discussion on how Quantumania‘s ending could have been improved, which, of course, involved the now-popular opinion that the film should have ended with Scott getting trapped in the Quantum Realm, rather than the happy ending we wound up getting.
Again, putting aside the fact that it could have helped establish Kang as a far more serious threat while adding onto Scott’s arc much more significantly, this alternate ending would have jumpstarted Cassie’s character arc in an enormous way.
Throughout the film, Cassie and Scott share contrasting points of view on the subject of justice, with Scott shying away from any more danger for the sake of preserving life with his family, and Cassie believing that they still have a responsibility to help those in need.
Cassie, of course, is right. Scott is an Avenger, and doesn’t have much business substituting crime-fighting with book signings. So, had Scott made the ultimate sacrifice by trapping himself in the Quantum Realm in order to prevent Kang from escaping, that would have been one big step in the right direction for Scott.
But it would have been ten big steps in an exciting new direction for Cassie. After she spent a good portion of Quantumania egging her father on about doing the right thing, how would she have responded if he finally did do the right thing at the cost of his, and, by extension, Cassie’s livelihood, family life, and capacity for emotional trauma?
Perhaps, for instance, she would start to realize that true justice isn’t quite the idealistic endeavor she originally thought it was, having now learned how much sacrifice tends to be involved with it, which in turn could result in her retroactively cutting Scott some slack. Such a development could have sent her on a fascinating trajectory for her growth as both a person and a Young Avenger, where she could have sought to reconcile this new inner conflict regarding the act of justice.
But alas, what could have been the site of a world-class moment of character development was instead nothing more than a lackluster CGI exhibit for Cassie, Kang, and, worst-case scenario, the ethos of the Multiverse Saga as a whole. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for a Phase Five phoenix moment, but this woeful mishandling of Cassie was no doubt one of the sourest surprises of all of Quantumania‘s misdeeds.