YOU THOUGHT THANOS WAS A MIGHTY FOE? PAH. AS KANG THE CONQUEROR TAKES CENTRE STAGE IN ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA, THE MCU’S TITCHIEST HERO IS ABOUT TO FACE AN EPIC THREAT

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

WHO IS THE most important hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? It’s a question that could prompt the kind of discussion you’d expect to rage for ages around an office water-cooler (the work can wait), or over a round of drinks, or with the person sitting next to you on a bus (NB: this is a foolproof method of making sure that nobody wants to sit next to you on the bus). Is it Tony Stark, the rock on which the MCU was built? Or maybe the indefatigable Steve Rogers? How about Thor, or Black Widow, or Captain Marvel, or Black Panther, or Doctor Strange? The answer is none of the above. The most important hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a guy without whom none of the events of Avengers: Endgame — Steve wielding Thor’s hammer, Tony reducing Thanos to dust — would even have happened. A brave and noble soul who emerged from exile in a strange dimension to kickstart the Avengers’ fightback after five years of them moping around the place. A regular man who just happens to be able to assume the size of an ant. An Ant-Man, if you will.

So Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang, aka the Ant-Man, deserves not only respect and the praise of a grateful universe, but an upgrade in cinematic terms after two fun but fairly low-key outings. And with Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, the first film of Phase Five of the MCU, he’s getting it. “We wanted to kick off Phase Five with Ant-Man because he’d earned that position,” says producer Kevin Feige, who as president is actually the most important person in the MCU. “To not simply be the back-up or the comic relief, but to take his position at the front of the podium of the MCU.”

The little guy is about to get his big shot.

The first two Ant-Man movies — 2015’s eponymous debut, and 2018’s Ant-Man And The Wasp — introduced Lang, a resourceful yet noble burglar who crosses paths with the cantankerous but brilliant scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his recalcitrant daughter Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), and winds up with a funky suit that, thanks to a marvellous invention called Pym Particles, allows its wearer to shrink to the size of a eusocial insect of the family Formicidae. And, later, to grow to the size of a small building.

And there was much of that in those two movies. There was shrinking aplenty. There was embiggening a gogo. There was Michael Peña providing ridiculous recaps as one of the MCU’s funniest supporting characters, Luis.

It would have been the easy thing for director Peyton Reed to do more of the same for the third instalment. However, that was the last thing he wanted to do. “We wanted to really pivot into something on a much larger canvas,” he says. “And also that went darker than you might expect.” Happily, Rudd, a co-writer on the first two movies, was on the same page, even if this time around he left the writing to someone else. “I didn’t really have the time to do it,” he says. “But we kept talking during the process. I kept thinking about Thor: Ragnarok, where it was like, ‘Whoa, we can’t believe this is the third one, it seems so different.’ There was something appealing about doing something unexpected.”