Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is right on our doorstep, with Scott Lang’s third outing set to hit theaters tomorrow. And while early reviews certainly haven’t done the film any favors (a 53 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes is only trumped by Eternals‘ 47), fans will no doubt be flocking to cinemas nonetheless given that it’s our first look at Multiverse Saga big bad Kang the Conqueror.
But it’s not just Kang that’s set to make his first splash with the MCU fandom; the likes of M.O.D.O.K. and a reimagined group of characters known as the Freedom Fighters look set to steal some of the spotlight in their own right. And, of course, the fate of the Ant-Man family almost feels like a character in its own right, given that the internet has been prophesizing a major Lang/van Dyne death since the first trailer dropped.
There’s one Ant-Man mainstay whose absence likely won’t go unnoticed for those who are plugged into Scott’s misadventures. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Quantumania director Peyton Reed admitted that the omission of Michael Peña’s Luis, Scott’s heist associate and one of the MCU’s greatest sources of comedic relief, was a necessary one to make for the sake of the story being told.
“There were no versions of this movie [with Luis]. There are a lot of characters in the movie. We obviously have our Lang, van Dyne and Pym family, but then we also introduced Kang, M.O.D.O.K. and all of our Freedom Fighter characters. So we had to make decisions early on about what stories we could tell and what stories we couldn’t tell. I love those characters. They were really, really fun and part of the Lang family, but as we got further and further into [development] and knew we wanted to bring the family into the Quantum Realm pretty early in the movie, it just didn’t make sense [to include Luis and co.].”
On top of ensuring that the film isn’t overstuffed, Luis’ absence is also indicative of the much more serious tone that this particular Ant-Man film is going for. Scott, Cassie, and co. are in for the fight of their lives against Kang, and with a less-than-favorable outcome likely on the horizon, we imagine we’ll only be getting so much relief during the film’s runtime.