ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA

IT’S KANG WARFARE AS ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA UNLEASHES THE NEW BIG BAD OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE

WORDS: NICK SETCHFIELD

NO ONE EXPECTED Ant-Man to even have a trilogy,” smiles screenwriter Jeff Loveness. “So let’s triple-down and make it the most climactic trilogy-capper you can imagine for a guy who shrinks to the size of a penny!”

That’s the inverse ratio at the heart of Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania. It not only pits Marvel’s miniscule hero against Kang, the new, reality-shaking Big Bad of the MCU, but tasks him with launching nothing less than Phase Five of the studio’s cinematic battleplan. Judge him by his size, do you? Think again.

“In the beginning we talked about what tone we wanted,” says Loveness, whose stint on Rick And Morty traded in the kind of interdimensional shenanigans the threequel demanded. “The first two movies are pretty light on their feet, pretty comedic. Talking about it with Peyton [Reed, director], it was almost a joke at first – ‘What if we just made this Return Of The King?’ – but we leaned into it. ‘What if, all of a sudden, Ant-Man is accidentally in this massive Lord Of The Rings, Avengers-scale movie, basically by himself – though obviously the Wasp and his family are in there too.

“There’s this deep family story that goes with it, so I also wanted to pay off all the dynamics between Hope and her family, Hank and Janet, Scott and Cassie and Scott and Hope as well. Luckily [Paul] Rudd and Evangeline [Lilly] and all those guys, they’ve got such warm personalities that you can lean on their charm. People like the characters and they’re along for the ride.”

SERIOUSLY FUNNY

“I was watching Fellowship Of The Ring the other day and was struck by how quickly the tone shifts from being light-hearted and comedic to intense apocalyptic stakes,” he continues. “Sometimes we like to peg movies down, so they can only be one thing. But that’s the charm of old adventure movies for me. And that was the joy of Marvel comics as a kid.

“Spider-Man does that better than anyone. He has such personal problems and such horrible things happening to him, but the basic drumbeat is always upbeat and funny and the character’s charming, so you kind of stumble along with him. I used that as a blueprint, to try to embody those Marvel comics I loved as a kid, which were able to balance both.”