The Powers That Be have spoken: off the back of the film’s impressive box office haul, Marvel has slated an Ant-Man sequel for a release in 2018, with the official title being Ant-Man and the Wasp. Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) will return alongside Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) when the follow-up scurries into theaters on July 6, 2018.
Arriving by way of Marvel’s official Phase Three update, news of a direct sequel to Peyton Reed’s summer hit is bookended by some release date reshuffling. By pegging Ant-Man and the Wasp for July of 2018, the studio has brought the Chadwick Boseman-led Black Panther forward to February 16, 2018, while the yet-to-be-cast Captain Marvel has fallen back to March 8, 2019. This isn’t the first time that Marvel has reorganized its line-up for Phase Three, with the company employing similar changes after Spider-Man swung back into the fray following the deal with Sony.
Simply announcing an Ant-Man 2 would be enough to send Marvelites into a tail-spin, but the studio went one step further today by filling up a trio of release dates in 2020. Adopting the company’s de facto three-films-per-year strategy, these untitled movies will arrive on May 1, July 10 and November 6 of that year. Make no mistake, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has a future beyond the two-part Avengers: Infinity War.
And so, we arrive back at Reed’s largely successful Ant-Man film. Though it may have lacked the charisma or inventiveness of, say, Jon Faverau’s Iron Man, the standalone feature was evidently a hit with audiences both domestically and worldwide, earning a respectable $409.8 million in total. Such success has brought about its follow-up, Ant Man and the Wasp, and we can hardly wait to see Evangeline Lilly have a more involved role in the diminutive sequel.
Ant-Man 2, now officially known as Ant-Man and the Wasp, will debut on July 6, 2018. For now, let the speculation commence!
