Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania goes too big and too small at the same time
The 2015 release of Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man may have been the last time the Marvel Cinematic Universe felt like a scrappy upstart. Edgar Wright’s departure from the project was surprising in part because Marvel Studios was still touting the idea that its success came from picking the right directors and letting them do what they wanted — even if they wanted to pick a more obscure hero to focus on, and even if they wanted to make a film that didn’t have to be a world-beating blockbuster and could just be fun, weird, and anti-establishment.
The previous franchise installment, just a few months earlier, was Joss Whedon’s heady Avengers: Age of Ultron, and the idea that Marvel would follow up with a movie about the guy who talks to ants seemed too bizarre to be corporate. Marvel further brought home the idea of a “little” MCU movie with a slew of cute, viral marketing gimmicks, and the cherry on top was the original Ant-Man “teaser trailer,” billed at the time as the first Ant-Man footage.
Paul Rudd and Michael Douglas are staring into each other’s eyes and snapping their fingers. It isn’t clear where they are or what they’re doing. A rising background tone begins to wail, as their snapping escalates to thigh-slapping, faster and faster. As Rudd flails his clapping hands between his chest and his legs, Douglas looks at the camera as if it’s insulted his mother and barks out: “ANTS!”
But that was eight years ago. In 2023, there are no parts of the Marvel Cinematic Universe small enough to be overlooked. The third movie in the Ant-Man subseries, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, is also the first step in a three-year saga. The “little” MCU franchise has been saddled with introducing the load-bearing narrative pillar for the
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