How Quantumania Sets Up Ant-Man 4 and Young Avengers

Peyton Reed has directed all three Ant-Man movies to date (a hat-trick matched only by James Gunn with his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy), and while he stays diplomatically vague about the idea of an Ant-Man 4 when we chat with him, he’s also not closing the door to it either.

“Listen, I think we all want to do different things,” Reed tells Den of Geek. “But at the same time, I’m superstitious about this, because you never know if you’re going to get to make another one. After the first one, it was not a guarantee we could make a second one and so on. I love these characters. We’ve been doing these movies together for eight, nine years now and we’re a family. We’ve made these movies together. We’ve seen these characters grow, and that’s been exciting. I’m very proud of the movies. So never say never. I’ve loved working at Marvel.”

While Marvel certainly doesn’t shy away from doing a fourth standalone movie for its primary characters—see Thor: Love and Thunder and the upcoming Captain America: New World Order—it’s frankly too early to say whether an Ant-Man 4 will be on the menu. A lot depends on the actors’ contracts and whether Rudd, Lilly, Pfeiffer, and Douglas are all willing to return.

On the other hand, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania does subtly drop some of the final pieces into place for another long-rumored MCU play: Young Avengers. Over the course of Phase 4 and this opening entry of Phase 5, nearly every major member of the junior team of Earth’s mightiest heroes has been introduced in a Marvel movie or TV show.

That includes Cassie Lang herself, who is known on the team as Stature, along with Patriot (Eli Bradley, introduced in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), Wiccan and Speed (Wanda’s children, introduced in WandaVision, although they’re currently not “real”), Kid Loki (seen in Loki), America Chavez (introduced in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), Kate Bishop/Hawkeye (introduced in Hawkeye), and even a version of Hulkling (glimpsed briefly at the end of She-Hulk).

Bizarrely, the founder of the Young Avengers in the comics is Nathaniel Richards, aka Kang himself, with the future tyrant going under the name of Iron Lad. Whether that will play out in some fashion in the MCU, or if we’ll someday see all these characters team up onscreen as the Young Avengers, is a question we bring up to Quantumania producer and Marvel inner circle member Stephen Broussard.