SPOILERS are ahead for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania!
Ahead of the third Ant-Man movie hitting theaters earlier this year, a popular theory spreading around was that perhaps Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang was going to die at the hands of Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror. Now that we’ve seen Marvel’s first entry into Phase 5, we know that just about every character in the movie will live to fight another day, except for when the divisive MODOK dies an Avenger. However, the movie’s writer has recently revealed Hank Pym almost had a dire fate.
Jeff Loveness, who penned the Quantumania script, has shared that Michael Douglas’ character, who originated the Ant-Man suit after discovering Pym Particles, almost kicked the bucket in the recent Marvel movie. In Loveness’ words to Backstory Magazine:
We were going to kill Hank at one point, and I was going to have him be, like, reanimated. His consciousness was going to live on through the ants, and he was going to be like mentally controlling them. Yeah, he was going to be almost like this hive mind of the ants, and I like that…that didn’t go too far.
That certainly would have been a… choice, wouldn’t it? While Loveness didn’t disclose how exactly Hank Pym would have died in Quantumania, one can surmise that Kang the Conqueror may have gotten to him in the third act to get back at Janet Van Dyne for deserting him in the Quantum Realm for so long.
Of course, the more intriguing bit of information here has to be the part where Hank Pym’s consciousness would remain somehow to control his beloved colony of ants after his death. But as Loveness shared, that idea didn’t make it past the early stages of his idea, and viola, Hank Pym is alive and well in the MCU, per the ending of Quantumania.
While I was watching Quantumania myself, I half-expected Janet Van Dyne to die after a recent Marvel trend has killed off mother figures of heroes, such as with Aunt May in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Queen Ramonda in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. However, it was nice to see the entire Ant-Man family remain alive and well after the events of the third film after so many other characters in the MCU have faced so much loss prior.
Sure, there’s a case to be made that it’s lame that Marvel’s new villain wasn’t able to foil a family of superheroes with ant powers, but upcoming Marvel movies certainly has time to buff up the major threat of Kang the Conqueror across its films before the next Avengers films coming in 2025 and 2026. Congratulations to Michael Douglas’ Hank Pym for not becoming Marvel’s latest casualty!
