When it comes to the worst post-credits scenes in the history of the superhero genre, look no further than last year’s Morbius for the winner. Michael Keaton and Jared Leto shared a nonsensical interaction that was designed to set up… something, but it was so evidently added in reshoots and utterly pointless that nobody really understood what was going on.
Admirably, director Daniel Espinosa tried his best to explain what was happening in at least a couple of interviews, which isn’t the comparison you want to be making to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s latest blockbuster. And yet, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania‘s Peyton Reed has offered a blow-by-blow breakdown of the mid-credits stinger in an chat with IndieWire.
It should be noted that if you’re a fan of comic books, or have a knowledge that the stinger was the first major tease on the road towards Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, then it makes complete and perfect sense. It you don’t, though, then you may have been left scratching your head by the multitude of Jonathan Majors who showed up to chew on the scenery under many different guises.
“He talks about his variants in the film, and obviously he was playing He Who Remains in season one of Loki, so it’s been discussed, and it’s like, ‘Well, at what point do we actually show some of the variants and that the Kang is a nexus being? And then it was like, ‘Well, what if we give them a little taste of a version of Rama-Tut, a version of a Centurion, a version of Immortus?’
In the movie, there’s a specific reason he’s been banished and exiled into the Quantum Realm, so it sort of begged the question of, ‘Well, who exiled him?’ I was trying to set up some version of a Godfather-esque mafia thing of like, ‘Oh, who’s triumphant? Who’s discussing the guy who’s no longer with us? And what does it mean to the larger sort of political body of the Kangs?’ Are these necessarily the ones that we’re going to see later? Who knows? But there are variants of each one, and we got really whacked out with it.”
Those completely unaware of variants, multiverses, and the Phase Five and Six lineup won’t be any the wiser upon hearing Reed’s explanation, but it’s yet another indictment that the MCU is starting to take for granted the assumption every single person who heads to the theater for the latest release is clued up on every single project past, present, and future. Based on the response to Quantumania, they’re not.
