What Ant-Man and Wasp: Quantumania’s ending means for the MCU, explained

Ant-Man & Wasp: Quantumanias Aptly titled: Between the Quantum Realm, the Ant-Man family, and the time-traveling warlord Khan the Conqueror, there’s a lot going on. .It’s designed to be confusing with so many future MCU stories open.

What does that mean for the future of the Marvel Universe? Avengers: Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars? Let’s see if we can solve these quantum threads without starting anything… Cantroversey.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Loki.]

quantummania It was billed as the first introduction to Jonathan Majors’ Kan the Conqueror, a time-traveling warlord who would serve as the final boss over the next three years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So it makes sense that he’s a little confused when he mega-hands his butt at the end.

Kang gets caught in a contracting portal that seems to destroy him completely. All of Team His Ant-Man escapes the Quantum Realm and safely returns to normal size. The people of the quantum realm have been freed from tyranny. And Scott Lang returns to his carefree life.

Or is he?

Image: Marvel Studios

Is Khan really dead?

Porygon has spoken quantummania About giving Kang such a big feature role only to kill him at the end of the story, Reed confirmed: Kang is dead — Kang will live long.

Reed said the idea was for Kang in this film to be “the most feared and most formidable Kang of all”, but that part of the setup was the same as any other Kang seen in the film’s mid-credits scene. It was creating a future threat of alternative Kang.

“At the beginning of the film, [Ant-Man] “There are secrets in the family that Scott doesn’t know,” Reed told Polygon. The secret is this self-doubt. We’ve caught him, he’s never coming out of the quantum realm. Did I accidentally destroy the entire population of the Earth? We introduced this self-doubt to Scott to see how it plays out in the future of the MCU. That was the fun side for us. It’s this hanging note at the end of the movie. ”

it seems like quantummaniaKang is just a herring, and its arena full of wild Kang variants is a real threat.

Image: Walter Simonson, Jon Buscema/Marvel Comics

What happened to all those cans?

There’s plenty of comic precedent for the Council of Kang, but for our purposes here, we’ll stick with what the MCU told us.

The first variant of Kang we met was He Who Remains, the secret boss of the Time Zone. LokiHe devoted himself to a strict policing of time, eliminating various options to deviate from the “Sacred Timeline”, the only version of it that found a way to cross the barriers between parallel universes. He tells Loki and Sylvie that if they kill him and restore the universe’s free will, the timeline will split into the multiverse, and eventually the rest of his many variants will meet, clash, and disintegrate. Warned that it would spiral into a time war…all of existence.

In the show’s finale, Sylvie kills the rest and Loki gets caught in the subsequent timeline. In this timeline, Kang the Conqueror openly controls the time difference, and the sacred timeline splits into an endless multiverse of infinitely changing parallel worlds, and he remembers it’s never been the same. the only person.

The Kangs of the Quantum Realm mention these infinite Kang variants, stating that they banished Kangs to the Quantum Realm because they did not agree with the looming threat. He warned the Ant-Mans. If he isn’t allowed to rebuild his ship and escape the Quantum Realm, there will be no one left to stop the other variants and disaster will ensue. I was pretty vague as to what I thought was wrong, and what exactly would be a disaster!

next, quantummaniaIn the credits scene, more dialogue takes place between the three Kangs at the Kang Council. The information obtained is still rather vague, but there is another important clue here. Kang was convened to discuss the invasion.

Image: Jonathan Hickman, Steve Epting/Marvel Comics

Wait a minute, what is an invasion?

The MCU introduced the idea of ​​Incursions, cosmic natural disasters in which two universes of the multiverse begin to collide, potentially destroying one or both of those universes. Doctor Strange in the Mad MultiverseStephen Strange visited a universe where his variants inadvertently caused an invasion and were executed. In another case, he also found the remains of another invasion event. Only a twisted variant of himself survived. Later, during one of her in the film’s credits scenes, Strange is voiced by a woman named Claire who tells him that he caused the break-in, so she comes to get him to fix it. Said.

We don’t know much about the MCU’s Incursions, but in the comics, by writer Jonathan Hickman, it was eventually released in 2015. secret warEvents The Marvel Cinematic Universe Will Adapt In 2026 Avengers: Secret WarsIn comics, however, superheroes never cause intrusions. They are natural disasters across the multiverse, accidentally set in motion by some of Marvel Comics’ near-omnipotent cosmic beings.

The MCU may be looking to make Incursion a more villainous plot than Entropy Reaction, and the Kangs Council could be how that happens.

Image: Marvel Studios

When is the reunion with Mr. Kang?

It looks like the next time we’ll see a Kang variant is in the second season Lokiaccording to Ant-Man & Wasp: Quantumaniascredit sequence.And it’s no surprise he’ll be in other upcoming Marvel shows and movies before 2025. Avengers: Kang Dynasty.

maybe we will meet him marvels November of this year Shangqi 2again Agatha: Order of Chaos In the winter of 2023 — but Marvel has yet to reveal that Jonathan Majors has signed up for any of these upcoming projects. Loki It’s season two.