Ant-Man
Scott Edward Harris Lang
Movie · Phase 3
Ant-Man and the Wasp
2018 · 118 min
Two years into house arrest for the Leipzig airport, Scott is building cardboard mazes for his daughter and counting down three days to freedom when a dream of Janet van Dyne puts him back in…
The Infinity SagaDisney+87%Released
The story
Two years into house arrest for the Leipzig airport, Scott is building cardboard mazes for his daughter and counting down three days to freedom when a dream of Janet van Dyne puts him back in business with the Pyms. They are building a tunnel to the Quantum Realm to retrieve a woman who has been down there for thirty years.
Everyone in the film wants the same lab: the Pyms, a black-market dealer named Sonny Burch, and Ava Starr, whose body is phasing apart because of a quantum accident Hank helped cause. It is Marvel's lightest film, and it closes with the single cruellest cut in the franchise.
Key facts
- Release date
- 6 Jul 2018
- Status
- Released
- Phase
- Phase 3
- Saga
- The Infinity Saga
- Runtime
- 118 min
- Certificate
- PG-13
- Director
- Peyton Reed
- Writers
- Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Paul Rudd, Andrew Barrer, Gabriel Ferrari
- Streaming
- Disney+
- Timeline placement
- 2018 — immediately before the Snap, ending during it
Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Paul Rudd | Scott Lang / Ant-Man |
| Evangeline Lilly | Hope van Dyne / Wasp |
| Michael Douglas | Hank Pym |
| Michelle Pfeiffer | Janet van Dyne |
| Hannah John-Kamen | Ava Starr / Ghost |
| Laurence Fishburne | Bill Foster |
Characters
Easter eggs
- The mid-credits scene places the film's ending inside the Snap: Hank, Janet and Hope dust while Scott is in the Quantum Realm, which is how he survives.
- Stan Lee cameos as a man whose car is shrunk mid-parking, shrugging that the sixties were very good to him.
- Laurence Fishburne's Bill Foster mentions 'Project Goliath', his own giant-sized superhero identity in the comics.
- Ava Starr's Ghost is gender-swapped from the comics' male Ghost, an Iron Man villain and corporate saboteur.
- Janet warns Scott about 'time vortexes' in the Quantum Realm, the exact mechanism Endgame builds its plot on.
- Janet's quantum-energy healing of Ava foreshadows the Quantum Realm civilisation revealed in Quantumania.
- The Baskin-Robbins running gag returns with 'Baskin-Robbins always finds out', paying off Scott's fired-employee status.
- The post-credits scene is a giant ant playing Scott's drum kit while the emergency broadcast system tone plays over an empty house.
Trivia
- It is the first MCU film to name a female character in the title.
- Michelle Pfeiffer had been courted by Marvel for years before agreeing to play Janet van Dyne.
- The shrinking-car chase was shot on location in San Francisco with practical vehicles on hidden rigs, including a Hot Wheels-scale Pez dispenser gag built as a real prop.
- Evangeline Lilly trained in multiple martial arts and did much of the Wasp's aerial choreography on wires.
- Peyton Reed positioned the film explicitly as a comedy palate cleanser between Infinity War and Endgame, and Marvel scheduled it that way.
- The Quantum Realm sequences expanded on the first film's finale with a substantially larger effects budget and a full art department reference library of microscopy.
- Randall Park's Jimmy Woo was created for the film and later carried into WandaVision.
Box office
- Budget
- $162 million
- Worldwide
- $622.7 million
- Domestic
- $216.6 million
Reviews
Critics
87%
Ant-Man and the Wasp brings some much-needed levity to the MCU, dialling down the world-ending stakes and delivering a light, breezy heist.
The MarvelGossips verdict
Pleasant, weightless and forty minutes of plot spread across two hours of everybody chasing the same suitcase. Pfeiffer and Fishburne are wasted, and Ghost is a genuinely sympathetic antagonist the film treats as an obstacle. The mid-credits scene is the best thing in it by a wide margin.
Related titles
Frequently asked
When does Ant-Man and the Wasp take place?
Concurrent with Avengers: Infinity War, ending at the exact moment of the Snap. Scott is inside the Quantum Realm when the Pyms dust, which strands him there for what feels to him like five hours.
Why isn't Scott in Infinity War?
He is under house arrest for his role in the Leipzig airport fight in Civil War, wearing an ankle monitor. The film's opening establishes he took a plea deal that Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson did not.
Who is Ghost in the MCU?
Ava Starr, whose body permanently phases after a quantum accident that killed her parents. Hannah John-Kamen returns as the character in Thunderbolts* in 2025, now working for Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.
Does this film set up Endgame?
Directly. Janet's warning about time vortexes in the Quantum Realm is the seed of the time heist, and Scott's survival is the reason the Avengers have a plan at all.