Long before Scott Lang became a permanent fixture of the MCU, director Edgar Wright was asked to spearhead Marvel’s first Ant-Man movie.
Had things panned out as originally planned, we imagine Wright and his team would have served up a totally different – but no less brilliant – movie experience. But sadly, it wasn’t to be.
One of the ways Wright’s vision differed from that of Adam McKay and Peyton Reed was the use of the Quantum Realm. Turns out Marvel’s Microverse “didn’t exist” in the original draft from Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish. And while discussing Ant-Man and the Wasp with THR, Reed outlined exactly how the Quantum Realm came to be the backbone of his own film. Not only that, but it’ll seemingly have a marked impact on the MCU moving forward.
The Quantum Realm didn’t exist in Edgar [Wright] and Joe’s [Cornish] original drafts. When [Adam] McKay came on, McKay and Rudd were writing drafts, and McKay also is a big comics nerd. McKay and I were talking about the Microverse. In a movie that had a lot of shrinking, it’d be great to figure out a thing in the third act that for the purposes of that story was almost a cautionary tale. If you turn off the regulator. It allowed us to give Scott Lang his moment of self-sacrifice, where he was going to potentially kill himself to save his daughter. It also occurred to us that we all love that sort of psychedelic side of the Marvel Universe. It’s the Microverse in the comics that we re-named the Quantum Realm for copyright reasons.
A potential copyright issue necessitated the name change from ‘Microverse’ to ‘Quantum Realm,’ though its abstract nature very much remains the same. It’s for this reason that the QR quickly became a visual playground for Reed and his team to get lost in.
It was never a mandate [from Feige], but it was, ‘this would be really cool.’ Also, visually it was really fun. It just happened to make absolute sense for the third act of our first movie. … I think Kevin has this large vision for what the MCU can be, and I know he definitely has a vision for what specific things he ultimately wants to see in it, but there is an awful lot of give and take with the individual filmmakers and stories that feed into that thing.
Elsewhere, Peyton Reed spoke to io9 in anticipation of his sequel’s release this Friday, and it was here where the director dropped a big clue regarding the Quantum Realm and the many secrets within. Turns out there’s actually a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of… someone, or rather something, hidden down in the depths.
One way or another, it will almost certainly affect Marvel’s Phase 4, as Reed tells io9:
We have definitely laid some groundwork for some stuff down there… similar to what we did in the first movie. [In the first movie,] it was not until really DVD or Blu-ray release when people started freeze-framing it like ‘Wait a second. There’s a reflection. Is that Wasp down there? Is it Janet? The Quantum Realm was daunting because the good news is the bad news. Which is it’s infinite and can be whatever you want it to be.
Ant-Man and the Wasp will be with us on July 6th.
