Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has reached just $363 million at the box office worldwide after two weekends, so it’s safe to say the third movie in the franchise will not be a billion-dollar hit for Marvel. But Quantumania does progress the overall MCU story that will culminate with Ant-Man and other Avengers fighting Jonathan Majors’ Kang.
We’re in the Multiverse Saga, so Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars will be big multiverse stories. We expect Kang to have various Kang allies from other realities; that’s no longer a spoiler. But Ant-Man 3 might have teased some of the prominent Kang variants that could face the Avengers. We finally know their identities, thanks to Quantumania director Peyton Reed. Before we proceed, know that big spoilers follow below.
The Ant-Man 3 credits scenes are no longer a secret, and most fans already know what happens in them. Either because they saw the movie in theaters or they caught the scenes online soon after the film’s theatrical release.
In one of them, we have the Council of Kangs meeting to discuss what had just happened. We learn from three of them that the council exiled Kang the Conqueror to the Quantum Realm. They were so afraid of him that they just had to get rid of the threat.
But the Council of Kangs didn’t have the guts to kill him. Or didn’t want Kang the Conqueror to die. They’re clearly unhappy that Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Hope (Evangeline Lilly) killed him. That’s why they convened the council, which features a massive number of Kang variants from the multiverse.
This is why we need to have different names for these Kang variants. Just like the main Lokis in the Loki TV show have different names: Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino).
As for Kang, we have already met three variants with different names. He Who Remains appeared in Loki. Kang the Conqueror and Victor Timely showed in Quantumania. The latter appeared in the film’s second credits scene.
Who are the three leading Kang variants in the Quantumania credits scenes?
Quantumania director Peyton Reed revealed to ET that the Victor Timely credits scene is from the Loki season 2. That means we’ll see this particular Kang variant later this year when the show hits Disney Plus.
Reed also spoke about the three Kang variants, which appear to have called upon all the Kangs in the multiverse.
“We knew we wanted to sort of just give a tiny taste of the potential of what some of these Kang variants are and brief nods to [Pharaoh] Rama-Tut, [Scarlet] Centurion, Immortus,” Reed said. “Maybe they’re variants of those [prime] versions” we’ll meet in the MCU’s main reality, he added. As expected, Reed wouldn’t spoil anything.
Rama-Tut is “just this sort of ancient Egyptian version in the comics,” Reed added. “But then we sort of bent [him] up a little bit and made him this very strange sort of bionic variant of Rama-Tut.”
“We wanted to give three distinct feelings and set up the idea of this triumvirate inside this sort of star chamber and now that Kang the Conqueror has met the fate he meets at the end of this movie, ‘What does it mean for the larger sort of political body of Kangs, right?'” the director said of the Quantumania credits scene.
“What happens in the sort of Godfather type thing of this power struggle of ‘Well, why was he, you know, in the movie?’ We revealed that he was exiled into the Quantum Realm and why and who did it. But [we] sort of starting to get into sort of the political aspect of how the Kangs relate to each other, which I think holds really strong potential for Phase 5.”
The director also said that Quantumania writer Jeff Loveness chose which Kang variants to feature in that scene. That’s because he’s also writing Kang Dynasty, and Quantumania is supposed to tease the next Avengers 5 movie.
This seems to imply we might see Rama-Tut, Scarlet Centurion, and Immortus soon. But we have no idea when that will happen.
