While news of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is at times scarce but comfortably confirmed with their shots mostly focused across the pond, I myself came across the image below twice from a stunt performer who had previously worked with Marvel Studios.
As we are familiar with past features (Spider-Man: No Way Home) sometimes a stunt team wardrobe will provide smaller insights into what’s going on. In this one, we have two things to focus on: the cracked Ant-Man helmet that belongs to Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang, and in its reflection, if you look carefully, is what appears to be our first look at Kang in the upcoming Marvel film.
While we met Jonathan Majors’ first interpretation of the character in the tense conversation between him and the two Loki’s (Tom Hiddleston and Sophia DiMartino), this He Who Remains version of Kang was killed by Sylvie. Meanwhile, Loki found himself in a new TVA with the comic-familiar suited Kang in place of the Time-Keepers found previously.
A quick comparison image from the comics and Loki shows how much closer we are to getting a fully comic-accurate suit for Kang the Conqueror that’s likely for season 2 of Loki. But the Kang in Loki isn’t necessarily the same Kang from Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. These may very well be different variant Kangs. If they are the same, which is quite possible, the reflective image above tells us we’ll likely see him sporting the traditional helmet in the third Ant-Man film to go along with the battle armor we glimpsed at in the Loki finale.
Kang’s battle armor is another weapon alongside his mind with the comic equivalent enabling him to lift up to 5 tons, project a force field around himself and most interestingly: survive without a food and water supply for a long period of time and as we know, time moves differently in the Quantum Realm. What could this mean? Perhaps one of the many Kangs is trapped and the introduction of our heroes accidentally supplies him with the technology necessary to break free or break into more worlds to conquer.
The reflection in Ant-Man’s helmet isn’t of the highest resolution so it’s hard to pick out more details from it past those. While it’s not distinctly clear the “background” along the top of the helmet shows what could possibly even be the Quantum Realm sporting the yellow/orange colors associated with it.
Since we’ve known for a while that Scott and co. will return to the Quantum Realm as well as face-off against Kang, it’s interesting to see what could be quite a spoiler in Scott’s badly smashed helmet there. As far as we know, Scott is still working with the upgraded suit that he wore from his sequel and into the final battle of Avengers: Endgame. What could this mean for Ant-Man if he’s missing a vital part of his suit? As Michael Douglas’ Hank Pym had mentioned, the importance of the helmet was to help stabilize the chemical imbalance brought forth from using the Pym Particles and shrinking the body. Will Scott experience “Quantumania” as a side-effect of being exposed?
We will have to see when Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania hit theaters in 2023!
