Posted in: Marvel Studios, Movies | Tagged: ant man and the wasp, film, marvel

Ant-Man and The Wasp: Peyton Reed Wasn't Mandated by Marvel to Add in the Quantum Realm

There is an idea that Marvel Studios gives their directors and writers very little creative control, despite the fact that director after director keeps saying that they were fairly hands-off as far as the creative process goes. It turns out that was very much the case for Ant-Man, according to director Peyton Reed. The Hollywood Reporter talked to Reed about the fact that the Quantum Realm would be playing a big part in the MCU going forward and asked how it was implemented into the the first movie.

The Quantum Realm didn't exist in Edgar and Joe's [Cornish] original drafts. When [Adam] McKay came on, McKay and Rudd were writing drafts, and McKay also is a big comics nerd. McKay and I were talking about the Microverse. In a movie that had a lot of shrinking, it'd be great to figure out a thing in the third act that for the purposes of that story was almost a cautionary tale of if you turn off the regulator. It allowed us to give Scott Lang his moment of self-sacrifice, where he was going to potentially kill himself to save his daughter. It also occurred to us that we all love that sort of psychedelic side of the Marvel Universe. It's the Microverse in the comics that we re-named the Quantum Realm for copyright reasons.

Reed went on to say that he never got an order from Feige or anyone else at Marvel to put the Quantum Realm into play because it was going to be a major part.

It was never a mandate [from Feige], but it was, "this would be really cool." Also, visually it was really fun. It just happened to make absolute sense for the third act of our first movie. … I think Kevin has this large vision for what the MCU can be, and I know he definitely has a vision for what specific things he ultimately wants to see in it, but there is an awful lot of give and take with the individual filmmakers and stories that feed into that thing.

Reed has been pretty up-front about the fact that he was more than a little bitter about Captain America: Civil War getting the Giant-Man reveal. It turns out that the movie also wanted the Wasp reveal, but Reed put his foot down on that one.

Oh yeah, I went nuts. "No, we can't do that." And also, there are so many characters in Civil War and also in Infinity War that it became a thing where, you can't have Wasp's coming out party in the movie, because you are only going to be able to devote this much screen time to her and that's what our movie really wanted to be about. Those kinds of things are conversations that happen and they just sort of organically reveal themselves.

The Wasp is absolutely one of the best parts of the movie, and she deserved to be front and center like this instead of just another member of either Team Cap or Team Iron Man. It's a good thing that this is the hill that Reed was willing to die on.

Summary: As Scott Lang balances being both a Super Hero and a father, Hope van Dyne and Dr. Hank Pym present an urgent new mission that finds the Ant-Man fighting alongside The Wasp to uncover secrets from their past.

Ant-Man and The Wasp, directed by Peyton Reed, stars Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Hannah John-Kamen, Michael Douglas, and Michael Peña. It will be released on July 6th.

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