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Director Peyton Reed Explains Ant-Man And The Wasp’s Lack Of Avengers Cameos

Why didn't Earth's Mightiest Heroes make a cameo during Ant-Man and the Wasp? Allow writer-director Peyton Reed to explain...

Save for Marvel’s tiniest duo, Ant-Man and the Wasp was totally free from Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. And for good reason, as Peyton Reed always viewed his 2018 sequel as a “standalone” adventure – you know, despite arriving on the heels of one of the biggest superhero movies ever attempted.

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The writer-director also wanted to avoid using cheap Avengers cameos, as doing so may have undermined the fledgling dynamic between Scott Lang and Evangeline Lilly’s Wasp, who now has equal footing with her male co-lead and is expected to feature quite prominently during Avengers 4… and beyond.

And though the original Ant-Man movie included a cameo from Anthony Mackie’s Falcon right around the time when Scott’s daring heist took him to the Avengers facility in upstate New York, there seemingly won’t be any nods to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes – post-credits scenes notwithstanding.

Via Cinema Blend, here’s what Reed said:

I always envisioned this as a standalone movie. Obviously when you see the movie you’ll see how it ties into the larger universe, but I like that Hope and Scott and Hank are operating in this little corner of the universe. And then you sort of… you know how it ties into the larger thing, you know the timeline, but they’re doing their own thing over there.

Reed continued by comparing Ant-Man and the Wasp to Marvel Comics in that there are often many different battles occurring at the same time – something which aligns with Scott Lang’s previous comments about the sequel running in parallel to Infinity War.

And I like that because it reminds me of the Marvel comics where you have the Avengers doing something here, and Spider-Man is doing something, and Black Panther is doing something, and Iron Man… they’ve got their own thing. And then there’s cross-pollination. And this felt like we had already set up… we had enough characters to service in this movie. It was exciting just telling the Scott-Hope partnership story, [which] was a big deal. And introducing Wasp. That to me was exciting and a big responsibility.

Ant-Man and the Wasp opens big this Friday, July 6th. How big, you ask? Try $80M at the domestic box office.