Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), who had been in the background of the MCU for his first two solo movies, was given the honor of starting Phase 5 with “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” It’s a movie that goes deeper into the “Quantum Realm” than the movies that came before it. It’s also the big debut for the new big bad in the MCU, Kang the Conqueror.
Most of the movie is a mix of different science fiction ideas. The Quantum Realm is more like an alien planet than a strange, abstract anomaly. “Quantumania” tries to be as strange and funny as the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, but it moves too fast and has a strange tone that make it hard to follow. After being pulled back into the Quantum Realm with his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), his girlfriend Hope (Evangeline Lilly), and his mentors Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), Scott finds himself in a fantastic battle for freedom. Kang (Jonathan Majors), with a little help from Janet, has taken over the Quantum Realm and is dangerously close to getting out.
Ant-Man faces Kang in an all-out battle after a long, winding journey through strange saloons and rebel camps. You might have missed the big points of the ending because of all the CGI goo and cringe-worthy lines, but don’t worry. Here is an explanation of the ending of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” which has a lot of spoilers.
Ants to the rescue
Kang takes a big hit from all of the rebels in the Quantum Realm, but it’s not enough to kill him. At the end of the battle, the winner jumps into the fray and starts killing everyone in an impressive show of strength. At first, it looks like he might be able to defend himself against the attackers. But then Hank comes with a whole bunch of ants.
Even though they are explained in the end, these super-ants from the future are still one of the more confusing parts of the movie. The first time we see them is when Cassie shows off her “satellite” from the Quantum Realm. At first, it seems like the two science fair projects might be related, but it doesn’t look like that’s the case. The techno-ants are just the most recent example of Hank’s obsession with the little bugs, which seems to have made them… smarter? Can you use a computer? It all seems a bit hurried.
Then, these ants are pulled along with the others into the Quantum Realm, where they meet a “temporal anomaly.” This puts them in a different time period (or place? It’s not clear), where they live and build a new society for a thousand years. They eventually find their way back to Hank and help him when he’s in trouble.
There are, of course, a lot of questions about this. Isn’t the Quantum Realm “outside of time”? Why didn’t any strange changes in time happen to the human characters? Unfortunately, or maybe it’s for the best, the whole thing is meant to be funny but isn’t very funny and avoids any legal responsibility.
Family first
“Quantumania” is, at its heart, a movie about family. It’s about how harmful it is to keep secrets from the people around you and how a family can get through anything if they stick together. How well it gets that point across is up for debate.
The main relationship in the story is between Cassie and Scott, who are father and daughter. Sometimes this relationship is cute and sometimes it works well. It’s also all over the place, which is a problem. The script doesn’t always make it clear what their relationship is. They argue, but they joke around so much that it never seems like anything is at stake. Most of the tension that the movie tries to make between them feels fake, and while their support for each other is heartwarming, it isn’t really looked at.
Same thing goes for Janet’s part in the story. She feels a lot of guilt about how she helped Kang, and she’s too embarrassed to tell her family the whole story. But again, this tension doesn’t really lead anywhere. Hope and Hank only ever support her — which, again, is nice to see, but also leaves viewers largely without an emotional anchor for Janet’s arc.
By the end, the film conveys a pretty benign but positive message about supporting your family and making space for their mistakes. It just would have been nicer if that message packed a bit more punch.
Going home
Kang is defeated by Hank’s army of sci-fi ants, and Janet finds a way to open a portal back to Earth. She probably turns around the signal that pulled them in the first time in act one and uses Kang’s rebuilt multiverse engine to make a portal they can walk through. But because everything happens so quickly and the technology isn’t well explained, it’s hard to be sure. Even so, everyone but Scott goes through before Kang comes back, which starts another fight between him and Ant-Man.
Hope jumps back through to help Scott, and after putting a few Pym Particle disks on Kang’s engine core, it looks like they have killed the bad guy for good. But it’s not clear what happens to the drive or to Kang, who seems to be pulled into it as it overloads. The result is that the portal closes, and Scott and Hope look out over the freed Quantum Realm, which could now be their permanent home.
They won’t be separated for long, though, because Cassie quickly presses some keys on her own device to turn it back on. This opens the portal again and brings the whole family back together. Again, this doesn’t really make sense. The core of the multiverse seems to have been destroyed, so how can Cassie get the portal to open again? If that was possible without the core, why couldn’t Kang have just made a device like hers and gotten out of the Quantum Realm a long time ago? If you look at “Quantumania’s” subatomic technology for too long, it starts to fall apart. The most important thing is that Kang is defeated (or killed?) and that everyone gets home safely.
Is Kang the Exile truly dead?
In the scene with the Council of Kangs after the credits, it is said that the version of Ant-Man that just fought in the Quantum Realm is dead. The Kang who looks like Immortus says this is true, and the other Kangs don’t believe him. You’d think that a group of so many powerful beings would know for sure one way or another, but it’s hard to tell if Kang is really gone for good.
Not much is said about what happened to him. When Scott pours water on the multiverse drive in Pym Particles, it seems to overheat, and Kang just disappears into it. It’s possible that the device’s energy burns him up on the spot, or that it pulls him apart into a million universes, splitting him up for good. But it’s also possible that he just teleported himself somewhere else, where he can wait for the right moment to strike.
It’s hard to say if Kang, who was sent away, will come back or not because so much about Phase 5 is still unknown. “Quantumania” makes him out to be a particularly dangerous Kang variant with a unique goal, but the franchise could just as easily replace him with the Council of Kangs. A story about the exiled variant coming back to get his revenge could be interesting because it would give viewers a more unique force to care about. On the other hand, it might be way too hard.
Kang’s master plan
Kang’s name isn’t said for the first half of “Quantumania.” People in the story call him “the conqueror” or just “him.” Janet doesn’t say much about the bad guy until the middle of the story, which is frustrating because the plot needs some mystery. Finally, about an hour into the movie, some backstory is revealed.
Janet was stuck in the Quantum Realm for a long time. During that time, she met Kang, who was also stuck there. He said he was a scientist and that something went wrong with his ship. Janet helped him fix it, but then she found out that he was a bad leader who had been sent to the one place he couldn’t get to through time travel. She (kind of) destroyed his multiverse engine and ran away. For the next few years, she and other people from the Quantum Realm fought against him.
Since then, Kang has been trying to get out of prison, go back, and get revenge on his enemies. But in the last part of the movie, we find out that he doesn’t plan to go alone. Kang says, after he gets Janet back, that he wants to take the whole empire he built in the Quantum Realm with him. This empire is a huge, futuristic sprawl that reminds people of his comic book headquarters, Chronopolis. It’s not clear if he plans to take the citadel straight to where his variants are hiding or somewhere else to keep getting stronger. Sadly for him, the time it takes to move such a huge fortress gives Scott and his allies time to attack.
Loki and Mobius return
The second scene after the credits in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantum Mania” sets up “Loki” Season 2, bringing back the Asgardian master of mischief (Tom Hiddleston) and his Time Variance Authority friend Mobius. At the beginning of the scene, a different kind of Kang gives an old-timey expo talk about his weird technology. Then it comes out that Loki and Mobius are in the crowd, and they’ve come here just to find him.
No one knows exactly when, in what timeline, or with which version of Kang this happens. It does, however, show a few things.
At the end of Season 1 of “Loki,” Mobius can’t remember anything about Loki because Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) opened up the multiverse and changed the timestream. When Loki goes back to the TVA, he finds a huge statue of Kang in the middle of it. Loki has gotten back at least some of his old trust and friendship with Mobius because he brought Mobius with him on his mission to find Kang. But the scene raises more questions than it answers.
Mobius doesn’t seem to know Kang, so Loki tells him how dangerous the bad guy is. But if the TVA has a big statue of Kang, wouldn’t Mobius know something about the conqueror’s personality? Season 2 of “Loki” will definitely show us more about this.
Rebellion
Janet says that Kang has killed a lot of innocent people on his way to getting power by destroying whole timelines. Through the people who live in the Quantum Realm, “Quantumania” shows what life is like when he is in charge.
At the beginning of the movie, the crew is pulled in. Scott and Cassie land in one place, while Hope, Hank, and Janet land in another. Scott and Cassie are found quickly by freedom fighters led by the fierce Jentorra (Katy O’Brian), who tells them that Kang’s army destroyed their home. So, it makes sense that when Cassie saves Jentorra in the last act of the movie, they can quickly get a lot of rebels to help them.
All it takes is for Cassie to give a stupid speech that is broadcast throughout the Quantum Realm, and then everyone will know that Kang’s fortress can be broken into. From there, more and more warriors come.
Kang has a few villainous lines about how many rebellions he’s put down and how many Avengers he’s killed in other timelines, but he can’t stop this one. The whole final battle is a huge, computer-animated reminder of one of the movie’s main ideas: that fighting for what’s right is worth it, even when the odds are against you. Throughout the movie, Cassie keeps bringing up this point, so it makes sense for her to be the one to rally the rebels in the last act.
The Council of Kangs
The first of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’s” two scenes after the credits shows the other Kangs who sent the movie’s main bad guy to the Quantum Realm getting together. In a colosseum that could be the real Chronopolis in the MCU, we see a lot of Kangs — what looks like “all” of them — gathering and cheering like crazy fans getting ready for war. But the main action of the scene happens in only three ways.
Fans of the comics should be able to recognize at least two of these Kangs, even though they don’t have names in this scene. The person who is leading the conversation and who seems to have called the meeting in the first place is dressed in royal robes and a tall hat that immediately make me think of Immortus, who is probably Kang’s most powerful form. He’s joined by a second version dressed as an Egyptian pharaoh, which calls to mind Kang’s first comic character, Rama-Tut. The third version of this core trio is much more science fiction-looking and almost looks like a robot. It’s possible that his design is based on the comic book version of Kang as Kid Immortus, but that would bring up a lot of other big questions.
All three of these Kangs from the Marvel comics play different and unique roles in the story, so it will be interesting to see how they fit together in the MCU. Their goal, on the other hand, is clear. The Kang Dynasty wants to get rid of the Avengers of the main timeline because they have become too powerful.
The death of M.O.D.O.K.
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is full of weird and strange things. It’s a movie that makes you think about important things, like how many holes you have. Any experienced comedian will tell you that making a character look like broccoli is just a classic way to write a joke. But perhaps the most confusing thing about the movie is how it treats the popular comic book villain M.O.D.O.K., a machine made only for killing.
In a strange turn, “Quantumania” turns Corey Stoll’s Darren Cross, who was the bad guy in the first “Ant-Man” movie, into M.O.D.O.K. Even though it’s hard to do M.O.D.O.K. in a way that isn’t completely ridiculous, this still seems like too much. In the last act, Darren’s character changes so quickly that it’s hard to call it an arc. This leads him to make a selfless sacrifice. His death is meant to be funny. Right before he dies, he asks to be called “The Avenger.”
It seems strange and isn’t very funny. This could be seen as a way to tie up loose ends from the beginning of the “Ant-Man” trilogy, but “Quantumania” rarely feels like the end of Scott Lang’s story, so Darren’s return is just annoying. He seems to be there more as a way to sneak in a death of a named character without having to kill the mood by killing one of the main characters.
The duty of an Avenger
Another major theme of “Quantumania” is what it means to be a hero. At the start of the film, Scott has to get Cassie out of jail after she’s arrested while protesting police brutality toward the unhoused. They have a proper confrontation about what it means to help people, and she clearly thinks he’s failed to live up to his title as an Avenger since “Endgame.”
This point comes up again after they’re pulled into the Quantum Realm. Scott just wants to get Cassie to safety as soon as possible, but she wants to stay and help Jentorra and the other freedom fighters. She tells him at one point, “Just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening.” But M.O.D.O.K. attacks before they can look into that idea in detail.
In the end, it seems like Scott gets back to being an Avenger. He uses his powers for good, like when he helped the people of the Quantum Realm get rid of their cruel ruler on bring-your-daughter-to-work day. Even though Scott and Cassie’s relationship changes a bit over the course of the movie, the scene where they hug is still very cute. She has now become a hero, which hints at where she might go in the franchise.
The fate of the Quantum Realm
Kang no longer has control over the Quantum Realm, at least for now, thanks to Scott and his friends. The conqueror’s fate isn’t clear, so things are a little up in the air, but even if he did make it out alive, he probably wouldn’t want to go back to the place where he lost so badly.
That makes you wonder what will happen next in the realm. Jentorra tells Cassie that Kang wiped out a whole society in her land. It probably looked a lot like places seen farther away from Kang’s reach, like “Star Wars” cantinas, busy open markets, and strange, living buildings built in more rural areas. Maybe that life will come back now that Kang is gone. Jentorra would be a great leader herself.
Obviously, this only explains a tiny part of the Quantum Realm. The whole story of “Quantumania” seems to take place in a small area, which Kang has taken over and turned into a small country. Janet says that the realm is much bigger than that and that it has worlds inside of worlds. This is hinted at again in the story about the ants that can go back in time. Could these other levels be looked at in later movies? In future MCU stories, could the Freedom Fighters join forces with the Avengers? Just wait and see.
The Kang Dynasty approaches
Even though there is still a lot we don’t know, “Quantumania” does its job of setting up the Kang threat for Phase 5 and after. Now that the council knows how popular and powerful the heroes are getting, it’s inevitable that they’ll all run into each other soon. Kang’s story seems likely to continue in “Loki” Season 2, but fans can also look forward to at least one more movie starring the bad guy in the future.
The next real “Avengers” movie will be called “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.” It will be the first “Avengers” movie since “Endgame” in 2019. The movie will come out on May 2, 2025, just a year before “Avengers: Secret Wars.” When two “Avengers” movies came out so close together the last time, things went pretty well. As the first of the two, “The Kang Dynasty” could go into more emotional and grown-up story areas, like “Infinity War.” Considering how great Jonathan Majors is in “Quantumania,” that’s a very exciting idea. It will also be interesting to see how closely the movie stays true to the plot of the same-named comic book.
Before then, Kang is likely to show up in the long-awaited “Fantastic Four” movie from the MCU. In the comics, he is often an enemy of the team. He has some interesting ties to Reed Richards, so it would make sense for him to play a big part. The Kang Dynasty is coming, and we hope it will be a lot of fun to watch.
What’s next for Cassie Lang?
There have been rumors for years that the MCU could work on a “Young Avengers” project. With characters like Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), and America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) joining the story in Phase 4, there are certainly enough heroes to fill up such a roster. In an interview with Inverse before “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantum Mania” came out, producer Stephen Broussard said that there are no plans for a movie like that right now. However, he did say that “passing the torch” was a big theme of Phase 4.
Cassie Lang would be a great addition to a story about the “Young Avengers.” In the comics, she and Kate are good friends and join the team together. They’ve also become a popular couple among Marvel fans, which is a great chance for Disney to finally show it means what it says about queer representation. Kathryn Newton is great as Cassie in “Quantumania,” and it would be fun to see her get even more important as the series goes on.
Will Ant-Man return?
Cassie Lang seems like a sure thing to be in future MCU projects, but her dad is harder to guess. Ant-Man has been played by Paul Rudd for almost a decade, and many of his other Marvel characters have been taken out of the MCU. Before the premiere of “Quantumania,” the actor told Insider, “I have no idea what my future is in the MCU or in Marvel.” “I try not to think about any of this too much because none of it is up to me. So you’d have to ask the top people at Marvel.”
In the comics, Scott Lang dies in a pretty bad way, which makes Cassie want to become an Avenger like him. Even though he seems to be headed for a happier ending in the MCU, “Quantumania” doesn’t rule out the character coming back to action. If the exiled Kang version is right and Scott’s actions in the Quantum Realm do endanger Earth (which seems likely), he might feel like he needs to put on his suit again. He would also have a lot to say if his daughter started fighting crime all the time.
