‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ director says the movie goes big and small

One of the signature ways that Marvel keeps its stable of superhuman crimefighters grounded and relatable is to create heroes who are still overwhelmed by the magnitude of their powers and responsibilities. It’s baked into the mythos of the Spider-Man lore, whose Uncle Ben reminded him that “with great power comes great responsibility.”

So it’s no surprise that Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the forthcoming third film in the MCU Ant-Man trilogy, centers around Paul Rudd as the titular tiny hero, Scott Lang, who finds himself overwhelmed not only by Big Bad Kang the Conqueror but also his continuing regular life responsibilities as a father and husband.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly at the San Diego Comic-Con this weekend, the film’s director Peyton Reed laid out the themes and central conflicts of Quantumania:

We were thrilled to get to do a third Ant-Man movie and do a trilogy. And we knew if we were going to do that we wanted to do some things differently. We really wanted to take a hard left turn and make a movie that was even more epic, but still progress the story of these family dynamics and everything that’s going on between Scott and Hope and Cassie.

Scott Lang was a thief who accidentally stole the “Ant-Man” shrinking technology during a burglary on scientist Hank Pym’s home in the hopes of making enough money to pay child support for Cassie. By the beginning of Quantumania, Lang is coping with the usual difficulties most parents find themselves dealing with after half the Earth’s population has been turned to dust by an interstellar megalomaniac with an Infinity Gauntlet:

Cassie is now 18 years old and maybe Scott doesn’t quite know how to relate to her as an adult because he lost those five years because of the events of Endgame. And we also knew that we wanted to put our heroes up against a very, very formidable opponent. I grew up reading the comics and I knew the character of Kang the Conqueror, who’s one of the big, big bad characters in the comics, so to be able to put up our heroes against Kang the Conqueror was a huge thing for us. We went big and we also went small.

Ant-Man: Quantamania is set to release in Feburary 2023.