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

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is aptly titled: There’s a lot going on between the Quantum Empire, the Ant-Man family and the time-traveling warlord Kang the Conqueror. What’s more, the film literally ends with an open question – it’s meant to be confusing because it opens up so many future MCU stories. All of this before the two post-credit scenes.

What does all this mean for the future of the Marvel Universe racing towards us? Avengers: The Kang Dynasty And Avengers: Secret Wars? Let’s see if we can untangle these quantum threads without starting any… kang troverse.

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

Image: Marvel Studios

quantum was billed as our first true intro to Kang the Conqueror by Jonathan Majors, the time-traveling warlord who will serve as the final boss for the next three years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So it’s reasonable to be a little confused when he ends up eating his butt with the mega hand.

Kang is caught in a shrinking portal that seems to be completely destroying him. The entire Ant-Man team makes it out of the Quantum Realm and back to normal size safely. The people of the Quantum Realm are freed from tyranny. And Scott Lang returns to his carefree life.

Or is it?

Image: Marvel Studios

Is Kang really dead?

Polygon spoke up quantum Director Peyton Reed on giving Kang such a big lead only to kill him at the end of the story and Reed confirmed: Kang is dead – long live Kang.

Reed said the idea was for this film’s kang to be “the most feared, most formidable kang of them all” — but that part of that setup created the future threat of any alternate kangs appearing in the film’s mid-credits scene too see are.

“The whole thing at the beginning of the film [Ant-Man] Family has secrets that Scott doesn’t know about,” Reed told Polygon. “By the end of the film, all of these mysteries are revealed. But now Scott Lang has a secret, and the secret is that self-doubt. kan — We’ve got him, he won’t leave the quantum realm. But wait, Kang also said that all these other bad versions of him would come out if he didn’t come out. Have I mistakenly doomed the entire population of Earth? Introducing that self-doubt to Scott to see how that might play out in the future of the MCU was fun for us. It’s that hanging note at the end of the movie.”

It appears that quantum‘s Kang was just a red herring, and this arena full of wild Kang variants is the real threat.

Image: Walter Simonson, John Buscema/Marvel Comics

What was up with all the kangs?

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

The very first Kang variant we met was He Who Remains, the secret boss of the Time Variance Authority, as seen in Loki. He had devoted himself to strict time control, cutting away any variants that deviated from the “Sacred Timeline” in which he was the only version of himself who had figured out how to cross the barriers between parallel universes. He warned Loki and Sylvie that if they killed him and restored free will to the universe, the timeline would shatter into a multiverse and eventually the many variants of He Who Remains would clash, clash and turn into a time war that would destroy would all exist.

In the show’s finale, Sylvie kills He Who Remains, and Loki ends up in the subsequent timeline where a Kang the Conqueror openly rules the Time Variance Authority, the Sacred Timeline has shattered into an infinite multiverse of infinitely different parallel worlds, and he is the only person who remembers it was ever different.

The Kang in the Quantum Realm mentions these infinite Kang variants and says that they banished him to the Quantum Realm because he disagreed with them regarding an upcoming threat. He warned Ant-Man and company that unless he was allowed to rebuild his ship and escape the Quantum Realm, there would be no one to stop the other variants, and disaster would ensue. But he was pretty vague about what the other variants wanted to do, why he thought it was wrong, and what exactly the disaster would be!

Then in quantumIn the credits scene of , we get another conversation between three kangs at the council of kangs. The information we’re getting is still pretty vague, but here’s another important clue. The Kangs have come together to discuss assaults.

Image: Jonathan Hickman, Steve Epting/Marvel Comics

wait, what is assault?

The MCU introduced the idea of ​​Incursions – a cosmic natural disaster where two universes in the Multiverse begin to collide, with the potential to destroy one or both of those universes Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Stephen Strange visited a universe where his variant accidentally caused an invasion and was executed for it. In another, he found the remains of another Incursion event where the only person left alive was his own twisted variant. Then, in one of the film’s end credits scenes, Strange was approached by a woman named Clea, who told him that he had caused a mugging and that she had come to get him to fix it.

We don’t know much more about Incursions in the MCU, but in the comics they were invented by writer Jonathan Hickman as the underpinning threat that eventually led to 2015 secret wars event that will adapt the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2026 Avengers: Secret Wars. However, in the comics, superheroes do not cause assaults. They are a multiverse-wide natural disaster accidentally set in motion by some of Marvel Comics’ near-omnipotent cosmic beings.

The MCU could be looking to make Incursions more of a rogue conspiracy than an entropic response, and the Council of Kangs could be the way that will happen.

Image: Marvel Studios

When will we see Kang again?

The next place we’ll see a Kang variant seems to be in the second season of Lokiaccordingly Ant-Man and the Wasp: QuantumaniaCredits sequence from . And it stands to reason that he’ll be appearing in other upcoming Marvel shows and films before 2025 Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.

Maybe we’ll see him inside The wonders this November or Shan Chi 2or Agatha: Circle of Chaos in the winter of 2023 — but Marvel has yet to reveal that Jonathan Majors has signed on for one of those upcoming projects. So for now: Loki Season 2 is it.