Photo: Ben Rothstein/Marvel Studios
There’s an after-party, and then there’s an AFTER after-party, am I right? Let’s start off by saying this is a SPOLER ALERT for anyone who hasn’t seen Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man and the Wasp, starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
“We knew at some point that we were a fairly stand-alone movie, but we knew we could not ignore the events of Infinity War,” director Peyton Reed says in an interview with Polygon.
After the film ends, Reed hits us first with a post-credit sequence that relates the film to the Avengers: Infinity War timeline. Hank miniaturizes his quantum tunnel until it fits inside a van, and Scott shrinks down into the quantum realm to harvest energy for Ghost so that she won’t revert back to a state of constant pain (which happens when she cannot control her phasing power). When Scott calls for backup to pull him out of the quantum realm and back to normal size, there’s no response. Back with the normal size folks, Thanos’ 50 percent purge of the universe takes full effect. Hank, Janet, and Hope are gone, leaving Scott stuck inside the quantum realm. How will he escape without someone to pull him out using the quantum tunnel?
Reed decided to wait until the after-credits to make the connection to Avengers: Infinity War timeline rather than planting Easter eggs along the way, which he felt would be too obvious,.
“It felt really fun to us to not have any clues for the bulk of the movie,” Reed says. “People would be watching movie, watching for clues, and then they hopefully get caught up in the story and forget about it. We liked the idea of the structure where, in true Ant-Man style, everybody has closure and everything’s tied together and almost in too neat of a bow at the end. Scott’s not on house arrest, and Ant-Man and Wasp are together, Scott and Luis’ ex-con business is doing well, and then to BANG—give the audience a gut punch right after the main credits.”
Then comes an AFTER after-credits scene. The enlarged ant that Hank trained to imitate Scott’s movements to spoof his ankle monitor is plays the drums in Scott’s house. A phone rings and there’s no one there to answer it. No one is there except the drumming ant… “Ant-Man and the Wasp will return,” says the screen.
I’ll be waiting.
