An Ant-Man 3 Deleted Scene Envisioned An Alternate Multiverse Life For The Wasp
This article contains spoilers for "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania."
There's a whole lot of everything in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania." Since last we saw them, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) have been busy taking care of their loved ones in a post-"Endgame" world. When she shows off her new invention, a grown up Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton) accidentally whisks the entire Ant-Family into the Quantum Realm: an infinite, microscopic world that bends the laws of time and space.
"Quantumania" serves as not just the start of Phase 5, but also an introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) and the next major chapter in the Multiverse Saga. So naturally, like any other Marvel movie, of course there was a lot left on the cutting room table as plans and ambitions shift around. Recently, a set photo posted by a child actor made the rounds online, leading many to speculate there was a deleted scene involving Hope's children from an alternate universe. As it turns out, those theories were spot-on.
In an interview with /Film's Ethan Anderton, "Quantumania" screenwriter Jeff Loveness opened up about some of the deleted sequences in the film — specifically, the scrapped scene with Hope and her children from another timeline:
"Oh, yeah [...] there are always plot lines or things that just don't really work its way into the flow of the movie. I don't know how much I can directly say, because I might pick some of this up later, but that was part of the multiversal engine core, that probability storm part."
Hope would have seen visions of her alternate lives
If you need a refresher, while Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfieffer) was stuck in the Quantum Realm all those years, she helped Kang build a multiverse transportation device. Once she realized Kang had darker intentions, she destroyed the multiversal engine core by blowing it up with Pym Particles. In exchange for Cassie's safety, Kang forces Scott to venture into the power core and brace the probability storm — one of the film's more memorable set pieces, in which Scott has to drown out the different manifestations of his potential choices (a climax which cleverly mirrors the ending to the 1998 animated hit, "Antz").
According to Jeff Loveness, when Hope tries to save Scott from the probability storm, she was supposed to have her own unique experience. "Scott's was obviously more of the Schrödinger's cat thing," Loveness explained. "Hope's originally had a bit more of a psychological element, like you were hitting the fumes of the multiverse and getting glimpses of stuff. She was in the upper strata of the storm, and then Scott was kind of down below."
Instead of seeing her doubles literally manifest in front of her, Hope was going to receive visions of her future and alternate lives. It seems this is where the scene with Hope and her two children would have come into play.
There's a high probability we aren't done with the Ant-Fam
The concept of Hope and Scott experiencing two different phenomena in the probability storm is pretty compelling, so why didn't it make the final cut? At the end of the day, Jeff Loveness admitted it was simply too much information for audiences to take in at once:
"But ultimately it was a little confusing. Like, why are two vastly different things happening to them? So it's my fault as a writer by not being clear enough. And [Evangeline Lilly] did incredible work. There's a lot of good Hope stuff that I think I'll try to explore later on. But Evangeline, she's a really expressive actor and put a lot of emotion in there. It was great stuff, but it's kind of my fault. I'll take the hit for that. It was better to streamline it to more of that fun sequence, which made its way in."
Considering that she shares half of the film's main title, it's a shame how little of Hope made it into the final cut of "Quantumania." That being said, the film is already bloated as it is, covering an extraordinary amount of ground in a relatively short amount of time. I can easily see why it wasn't worth it, from Loveness' perspective, to pack even more into the movie — material that risked feeling more tangencial than essential, no less.
Still, this is just the start of the Multiverse Saga, so perhaps down the line there will be an opportunity to explore an alternate version of Hope and the life she leads as a mother in a future film. "Quantumania" might be the third "Ant-Man" film, but there's plenty more to come for the MCU's Ant-Family.