The following article will contain spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. If you haven’t seen the film only continue at your own risk.
With any comic book property, there’s always the discussion if there truly are any stakes. Some have had ongoing accusations of superhero films not having any real consequences, as they need to make many more movies moving forward with their various superheroes. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania‘s writer Jeff Loveness highlights, however, that everything was on the table even Scott Lang’s death. He even acknowledges the criticism that this story “didn’t matter” due to the status quo not truly changing by the end of the film.
They were. We certainly gamed out a ton of scenarios, but it just felt a little obvious. It’s up for debate, but it just felt like we’d be copying the Thanos approach where he comes in pretty heavy and wipes the floor with everybody. I certainly see the critiques and all that, but this is a multi-step story that we’re telling. It’s also an Ant-Man movie. I think people say they want that, but do you really want to see Paul Rudd get murdered in his third movie? It was all debated, all discussed and all gamed out, but in The Wizard of Oz, you don’t want to see Dorothy die and never go home. It’s supposed to be one of these classic adventure movies. If everyone gets eaten in Jurassic Park, I don’t know if you’ll want to see the next Jurassic Park. But I wouldn’t worry too much about Kang’s kill count. He’s going to rack up some kills as he goes along.
Jeff Loveness
It definitely sounds like they had every option on the table but wanted to avoid just repeating the same beats from previous movies or generally being too predictable. When asked if they even considered just having Ant-Man stuck in the Quantum Realm once again, he highlighted the fact that they’d “be copying the exact same beat from the end fo the last Ant-Man movie.”
Yeah, absolutely. That was all stuff we debated, and on paper, it seemed thrilling. But at the end of the day, we’d literally be copying the exact same beat from the end of the last Ant-Man movie. There also weren’t a lot of ways to go that were different from Endgame. If Scott gets trapped in the Quantum Realm like he does in the last movie’s ending, then the only way to go is that he gets out of the Quantum Realm like he does in Endgame.
Jeff Loveness
He goes on to highlight that their approach was to create this happy ending that might actually just be misleading. Scott Lang has a heavy burden on his back once again, and maybe the key to uncovering Kang’s true villainy in the multiverse given what he knows, or as Loveness puts it: “terrible sinking feeling that’s coming for him.”
Scott Lang, much like Spider-Man or Charlie Brown, is a man who’s been through constant pain, loss and sorrow. And so the more unexpected thing would be to maybe give him a happy ending, but with the lack of assurance that he has in the first act. There’s this ever-gnawing sense of dread in him, whereas at the top of the movie, he’s carefree while his family are keeping secrets from him. And now we end the movie with his family carefree, but he has this secret that he’s keeping. He has this feeling of approaching dread, and he’s choosing to bury that terrible sinking feeling that’s coming for him.
Jeff Loveness
It’s definitely an unorthodox approach hidden away in something familiar or audience. Ant-Man films are also not the ones where many would expect a major tragic death, and it would’ve been too obvious to just repeat what we already saw in the last Ant-Man post-credit sequence. Perhaps future films will add even more weight to the events of this film as we move further into the Multiversal Saga.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
