WARNING: The are major SPOILERS ahead for Ant-Man and the Wasp.
So if you haven’t seen the Marvel blockbuster yet then you should proceed very, very cautiously.
In fact, you should probably just bookmark this article, go and enjoy the film, and then return to read what director Peyton Reed has to say about a potential follow-up.
Peyton Reed has confirmed his interest in overseeing “Ant-Man 3,” teasing that he even started to dream up potential ideas while figuring out the plot for “Ant-Man and the Wasp.”
“As we were working on the story for this one, and starting to figure out the jumping off point for the characters and where they could go there was a lot of stuff that occurred to us. ’If we do this here, if we set this up here, it could potentially lead to this other place’,” Reed recalled during our recent chat.
It also helps that Reed, who was a last-minute replacement to direct 2015’s “Ant-Man” after Edgar Wright dropped out just a year before its releases date, is still very much enamored with its characters.
“I really have fallen in love with these characters, and feel this ownership over them. I think there’s a lot more story to tell for all of these characters.”
But while Reed insisted that “there are no specific plans for the next film” and no solid “idea yet” he did admit that he would love to explore the Quantum Realm, where Janet Van Dyne was trapped for 30 years before being rescued, in much more detail, while also teasing that Michelle Pfeiffer’s character has evolved due to her her time in there.
“What I do know is that we have really just dipped our toe in the Quantum Realm. That’s potentially an amazing place, as it is in the Marvel Comics, which is what we feed off.”
“I think there’s a lot more to tell with this partnership between Ant-Man and Wasp, and obviously with the character of Janet Van Dyne we just get a glimpse of who she is now as to who she was back in the day.”
“In the appearance of Janet, we wanted to tease that she is not the same woman that she was 30 years ago when she went down there. Not only has she survived down there, but maybe she has evolved … There’s potentially a lot of story to tell there, too.”
Reed enthused that, when it comes to the Quantum Realm, there are endless cinematic possibilities, and the opportunity to explore and expand it was one of his main ambitions with “Ant-Man and the Wasp.”
Despite the film achieving that goal, Reed insists that they have still barely scratched the surface of the Quantum Realm.
“One of the biggest things was, we had set up in the first movie this notion of the Quantum Realm. And we knew that if we had a chance to make this movie that we wanted to spend a bit more time in the Quantum Realm.”
“So being able to design the look and the feel and what happens down there in this movie was really, really exciting. Because the possibilities are actually limitless in terms of what the Quantum Realm could be.”
“We wanted to create an internal logic for this Quantum Realm. The other big issue was how much of the Quantum Realm could this movie contain.”
“We were really devising the entire thrust of the plot to be whether Janet Van Dyne was still alive down there. And, if she was, how could our characters locate her and get her out and how could we create this real sense of a mission with a real ticking clock.”
“So really, we had set up in the first movie that Scott Lang had done the impossible, he had gone in and out of the Quantum Realm. He had only made it as far down as this level called the Void. Which in the first movie felt like a place that you don’t come back from.”
“So we really wanted to set up, in creating this Quantum Tunnel and Quantum Pod technology, Hank and Hope theorizing that if you could just penetrate that membrane of the void, and maybe get to a theoretical other side, what might be down there.”
“And setting up this logic that there is this ticking clock and space time shift that only ever happens once ever 100 years so they have to get Janet now. And the idea that they are going to meet them on the top most side of the Quantum Realm, right in this area she calls the wasteland just beyond the Void.”
Hopefully we will get to see more of the Quantum Realm in the very near future, as the post-credits scene for “Ant-Man and the Wasp” concludes with the disintegration of Hank, Janet and Hope half-way through an experiment, which traps Paul Rudd’s Scott inside it.
Fingers crossed he doesn’t have to wait 100 years for the next space time shift to get out.
