(The following post contains spoilers about Ant-Man and the Wasp and Avengers: Infinity War, so you have been warned.)
Peyton Reed’s Ant Man and the Wasp is about as self-contained as Marvel Cinematic Universe movies come these days. There’s not even any kind of cameo from the other MCU films that we usually see. (Even Black Panther had a Bucky cameo.)
But there was also no way this film could ignore the events that occurred during Avengers: Infinity War. So, after the story is wrapped up, in a mid-credit scene, we watch Scott Lang go into the quantum realm, only to get stuck there because Hank, Janet and Hope have all been snapped into oblivion by Thanos. And that’s how we leave it all until next spring.
So we asked Peyton Reed about that mid-credit scene and if it was difficult to “snap” all these characters away after just watching a whole movie about getting them all back together.
“The thing that really appealed to us,“ says Reed, “was because it was a thing the whole way through of how are we going to deal with this issue Infinity War, and it occurred to us we were going to do it in an Ant-Man and the Wasp way. Which was to tell our story, make it self-contained, and make the ending of the movie with everything wrapped up in such a neat bow at the end of the movie. The mission at hand, Scott Lang being on house arrest and seeing his daughter, the X-Con guys landing the big fish and getting their company saved, Hank and Janet reunited – it’s all The Partridge Family, the neatest possible bow of all time. And then we go into a colorful credit sequence. And then do this scene that would hopefully punch the audience in the gut.”
Reed continues, “And even in the scene, we introduce all of these elements all at once to the audience. It’s like, oh, this is the first time I’ve seen Janet in street clothes. And they are in a parking lot? And there’s Luis’ van? And Scott in the suit and he’s going to the quantum realm in a shrunken tunnel? So everyone’s mind is on trying to make sense of the stuff at hand, so that hopefully the thing we were ultimately doing wasn’t immediately occurring to them.”
Though, I did point out that Infinity War was still very much on my mind and I was expecting something bad to happen in that scene.
“I think everybody does,” says Reed. “I think everybody in the back of their minds’ are like, “okay, they can’t ignore it, they can’t ignore it.” What’s going to happen and who is it going to happen to? So we wanted to just have fun with that. And for me, you’re not going to do the event in a bigger way than Infinity War did it. It had to be its own different tone and it had to be specific to our movie.”
As Reed says, he wasn’t going to try to top Infinity War, especially after he had already seen an early cut and was blown away by Peter Parker’s final scene.
“Oh God, when I first saw that moment in Infinity War – in an early cut where the effects weren’t done; I think they were still grayscale effects – it killed me. It was like Saving Private Ryan stuff. It’s like, oh my god, the extended Peter Parker moment was fantastic. I love it. So we don’t bask in it the way they did.”
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