Ant-Man movies had a big, bad influence over the MCU

Iron Man, Black Widow and Black Widow both are gone. Thor is currently parenting. The Avengers orientation is likely to continue with new versions of Black Panther or Captain America. Marvel Cinematic Universe seems to have the natural opportunity to make Scott Lang, ex-con comic relief third-stringer superhero and Avengers frontman in 2023. But the press over Scott’s big jump in narrative responsibility in Quantumania: Ant-Man & the WaspIt is easy to overlook the truth. Ant-ManThe MCU has always had movies as a core component.

The first and second are different. Ant-ManMovies functioned like light-breathing devices following the mega-team up Avengers movies. Quantumania: Ant-Man & the Wasp got a prime position as the kickoff movie for the MCU’s “Phase 5,” introducing primary multiverse antagonist Kang (Jonathan Majors) to the big screen after a brief appearance in the LokiTelevision show. It seemed like a new direction for Ant-Man — especially with director Peyton Reed talking up his excitement over repositioning the series from post-AvengersA palate cleanser to big-mythology main dish

But there’s more to Ant-Man than even Reed is giving him credit for, and it goes back to his introduction in 2015’s Ant-Man. So many heroes have been inducted into the MCU via origin-story features and TV shows at this point that it’s easy to forget how early in the franchise that movie arrived. The original Avengers were the focus of almost every Marvel movie produced at the time it was released. The Avengers’ 2012 lineup, with several entries apiece for mini franchises centered on Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. There was an Incredible Hulk movie there as well, which has been omitted due to recasting. Ant-ManThe first story of origin outside the circle was this.

Image: Marvel Studios

Yes, Guardians of the Galaxy arrived in 2014, but that wasn’t a superhero solo joint: It’s a team-building movie in the AvengersStar Wars: A Star Wars Star Wars Vessel. James Gunn transformed that movie from the MCU of the time into something entirely new. Ant-Man put the “more” into “more of the same.”

2014. Ant-ManIt looked like the movie was being made because Edgar Wright, the director of the MCU, had done some preproduction work before leaving the project. Also because it could be used by the MCU’s profitable brand for a second film in that year. This oddly important status of an “also-ran” was crucial to Ant-Man’s legacy. Movies like Ant-Man, 2016’s Doctor StrangeAnd Shang-Chi & the Legend of the Ten Rings were never going to have the same seismic impact on cinema as 2008’s franchise-launching Iron Man.

Eight years later, however, Ant-Man looks like a crucial signpost on the MCU road — proof that where Iron Man didn’t need Batman-level popularity to lead a massive franchise, future installments in the franchise didn’t You must be Iron ManIn order to become a crowd pleaser, it is important that you are viable. Casting an established star as a lower-tier superhero didn’t always have to mean a Robert Downey Jr.-level star giving a career-redefining performance as a Tony Stark-level character. Paul Rudd is a popular comic actor and could play Scott Lang, the comic’s most well-known mainstay. Ant-Man wasn’t a massive hit to end Phase 2, but it established a clear MCU baseline in a post-Iron Man world.

Retrospectively, we can see that the first Ant-ManAs the MCU production pipeline grew, the default tone was established. The movie has earned a good reputation for being one of the most funny Marvel films. It certainly does have some more running gags than say. Doctor StrangeOder Black Panther. But take another look at the movie: It doesn’t actually have that many jokes, especially for a screenplay co-credited to Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, and Paul Rudd.

Image: Marvel Studios

Although the MCU’s comic tone is frequently attributed to Joss Whedon and Downey, as well as various attempts at imitating those voices, later films are far less similar to them. Whedon’s writing is carefully calibrated (sometimes downright calculated) to weave together genuine pathos, tension-breaking wisecracks, and catchy turns of phrase. The shortcut-heavy language of the weaker MCU entries — the language of “So That happened” or “I ruined the moment, didn’t I?” — is much more Ant-ManThere are more Age of Ultron. It was a sound approach to projects that, like Rudd and Lang, made sense.

Thought Ant-Man feels like a template in a lot of ways, that templating process wasn’t immediate or absolute. Some of the Phase 3 movies that followed were among the studio’s best and least generic: Spider-Man Homecoming, Thor: RagnarokThe triumph of the original Black Panther. Given the relative leeway afforded to directors Taika Waititi or Ryan Coogler, it might have followed that 2018’s Ant-Man and The Wasp could further lean into the zippy style of returning director Peyton Reed, who previously made the giddy cheerleading-competition comedy Take It onThe retro rom-com and other retro romances Love is down. This was a short, low-stakes adventure that took place before the events of the just released apocalyptic saga. Avengers: Infinity WarIt had to be tied to other Marvel films. Reed had the financial resources to turn it into an outlier. Ant-ManOriginally, it was.

Instead, Ant-Man and The Wasp established even more MCU parameters — this time visually. Dante Spinotti is a Cinematographer. HeatAnd L.A. ConfidentialThe same washed out palette that the Russos loved is used by. This was the right choice for the grit.The Winter Soldier: Captain AmericaHowever, this style has flattened the appearance of movies across all MCUs, regardless of their subject matter. Comparable to Ant-Man and The Wasp’s drabness, the first Ant-Man looks like a model of vibrant contrast, shadow, and color — it looks like a real movie. Captain Marvel, Spider-Man has no way homeYou can find a lot of them here. Shang-ChiThe MCU movie, along with other MCU films, is largely based on the Wasp look, even though they’re coming from different (and in their other work, often highly distinctive) cinematographers.

Image: Marvel Studios

It is even more powerful than the predecessor. Ant-Man and The Wasp now feels like a test balloon: It’s sort of a comedy-of-remarriage chase movie, with elements of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 screwball romance What’s Up, Doc?The 1988 Robert De Niro/Charles Grodin Action-Comedy Midnight Run. Which sounds like a highly distinctive project — except that Reed folds all these elements into a standard-issue, color-drained superhero adventure with the lightness of a satisfying action-comedy, but not the actual laughs. It creates the impression of a good time with likable characters and inventive special effects, but it’s also helping build an MCU where even the most specific visions have to conform to the house look and feel.

Wasp also marks the spot where fans should have realized it was pointless to hope for individual MCU movies to skirt the franchise’s well-established boundaries. The paired-up titles characters would be Ant-Man and The Wasp can’t share more than the occasional chaste kiss, it seems vanishingly unlikely that other relationships in the MCU will be afforded any genuine romance. There are Ant-Man movies aren’t the only MCU projects to suffer because they overpromised about genre experimentation. However, their influence is felt in terms of setting clear narrative limits even for low-stakes projects.

It is a fact QuantumaniaIt might appear that subsuming the Ant-Man series’ perceived smallness and modesty into cosmic MCU world-building is a refreshing change. In a few ways it is. There’s no Michael Peña telling a long and comically detailed story, no giant Pez dispensers, and no small-scale villains. It presents Kang the potential Avengers adversary and even reinvents an Ant-Man villain as a larger, more sinister bad guy. The movie turns on what should be a series of clever ironies: Scott opens the movie with narration about how he feels like he’s on top of the world after his outsized role in saving the universe in Avengers: Endgame, only to be sucked into another world of consequences he isn’t ready for. By shrinking its characters down to visit the Quantum Realm, the movie turns so “small” that it becomes big again.

However Quantumania isn’t really contorting itself to fit into the MCU better. It’s completing a process of conforming the MCU to the middling levels of an Ant-Man movie, to the point where a lightweight, mildly amusing adventure is more or less indistinguishable from a universe-altering, dimension-traversing epic. This movie is a battle between the complacency and idealism of an established superhero, or the engineering of a family-friendly adventure. Is it a quippier Star Wars riff, à la Guardians of the Galaxy, or a vehicle for Kang’s doomy sci-fi portent? The filmmakers would likely say yes to all of it: It’s another one-stop shop for MCU entertainment.

But Quantumania, like a lot of recent MCU movies, struggles with scale — and not in the fun, playful way that the original Ant-Man did with its satisfying action sequences (one of its strongest elements, and one that inexplicably didn’t carry over to any of the films it seems to have inspired and templated). Its weightless actions take place within a spiritual and physical void. In loose paraphrasing Norma Desmond Sunset Boulevard., Ant-Man hasn’t suddenly gotten big — it’s the pictures that have gradually gotten small.