There’s little doubt that Avengers: Infinity War was the most colossally expansive, universe-changing entry in the MCU thus far, so when the studio’s next release is a film called Ant-Man and the Wasp, the jokes kind of write themselves. But while the sequel to 2015’s Ant-Man was certainly a significant scale-down from the sprawling ensemble actioner that came before, many viewers and critics found the lighter tone and smaller story to be a refreshing change of pace after Infinity War got so big and bleak.
Based on his recent comments to Tech Crunch, director Peyton Reed certainly doesn’t feel too bothered about working in the shadow of the previous Marvel movie, explaining that he wasn’t trying to top Infinity War but rather do something a little different.
“That really is part of the Ant-Man movies — the stakes are really high… they’re just personal stakes,” Reed said. “You know it’s not a gigantic, genocidal villain like Infinity War. On that level, we don’t want to top Thanos.”
This sounds like a pretty level-headed approach for a film that was never going to match the sheer scale of the bigger-budged Avengers movies. All the same, Reed has also expressed a little heartbreak at seeing his own characters leave the coop to join the resistance against Thanos.
“I think I do like that when we come back and do tell the next chapter of the Ant-Man and the Wasp story, it does give us room narratively to really develop their characters in a way that I think is definitely more challenging to do in the larger ensemble movies. So, there’s probably a little piece of me that will always die when they go off and do someone else’s movie, but hopefully, at the end of the day, they’ll come back home.”
If the heroic pair of Ant-Man and the Wasp ever do come back to Reed, it will probably be quite the wait first, seeing how Avengers 4 won’t be closing the curtain on Phase 3 of the MCU until May 3rd, 2019.
