What Ant-Man and Wasp: Quantumania’s ending means for the MCU, explained

Quantumania: Ant-Man and The Wasp is aptly titled: Between the Quantum Realm, the Ant-Man family, and the time-traveling warlord Kang the Conqueror, there’s a lot going on. And that’s on top of the movie literally ending on an open question — it’s designed to be confusing, because it’s opening up so many future MCU stories. These are just the pre-credit scenes.

This all has implications for Marvel’s future. Avengers: The Kang Dynasty And Secret Wars: Avengers? Let’s see if we can untangle these quantum threads without starting any… Kangtroversy.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Loki.]

Image: Marvel Studios

Quantumania was billed as our first real intro to Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror, the time-traveling warlord who will function as the final boss for the next three years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So it’s reasonable to be a little confused when he gets his butt mega-handed to him at the end.

Kang becomes trapped in a tunnel that shrinks and threatens his life. Team Ant-Man manages to escape the Quantum Realm. They are all safely returned to their normal sizes. Tyranny is no longer an issue for the Quantum Realm. Scott Lang returns to his happy, go-lucky lifestyle.

Or does he?

Image: Marvel Studios

Kang is really still alive?

Polygon interviewed Quantumania director Peyton Reed about giving Kang such a big feature role only to kill him at the end of the story, and Reed confirmed: Kang is dead — long live Kang.

Reed said the idea was for this movie’s Kang to be “the most feared, most formidable Kang of all of them” — but that part of that setup was creating the future menace of all the alternate Kangs seen in the film’s mid-credits scene.

“At the beginning of the movie, the whole [Ant-Man] family has secrets that Scott doesn’t know about,” Reed told Polygon. “By the time you get to the end of the movie, all those secrets are out. Scott Lang is now hiding a secret. The secret? Self-doubt. Kang — We got him, he’s not going to get out of the Quantum Realm. But wait a second, Kang also said that if he didn’t get out, all these other bad versions of him were coming. Am I predicting the end of all life on Earth, or did I make a mistake? Scott was presented with this self doubt to help him see the possibilities for the MCU’s future. That was an enjoyable aspect to it. It’s this hanging note at the end of the movie.”

This seems to be the case Quantumania’s Kang was just a red herring, and that arena full of wild Kang variants is the real threat.

Image: Walter Simonson, John Buscema/Marvel Comics

Is there something with all the Kangs?

There’s lots of comic book precedent for a Council of Kangs, but for our purposes here, we’ll stick to what the MCU has told us.

He Who remains, who is also the Time Variance Authority’s secret boss, was our first Kang variety. Loki. He had dedicated himself to tight policing of time, pruning away any variant choices that diverged from the “Sacred Timeline” in which he was the only version of himself who had figured out how to cross the barriers between parallel universes. He told Sylvie and Loki that they had to kill him and restore free will to all the universe. The timeline would then splinter and become a multiverse.

In the show’s finale, Sylvie kills He Who Remains, and Loki winds up in the subsequent timeline in which a Kang the Conqueror openly rules the Time Variance Authority, the Sacred Timeline has fractured into an infinite multiverse of infinitely variant parallel worlds, and he’s the only person who remembers that it was ever any different.

Kang, in Quantum Realm refers to those infinite Kang varieties. They exiled him to Quantum Realm for disagreeing with them about a coming threat. Ant-Man and his crew were told by Kang that they would not let him rebuild his ship or escape from the Quantum Realm. Then, disaster was sure. However, he wasn’t clear on the exact nature of the disaster, what other variants would do, how he felt it was wrong and why.

Then, in Quantumania’s credits scene, we get some further conversation between three Kangs at the Council of Kangs. The info we get is still pretty vague, but there’s another important clue here. Kangs meet to discuss Incursions.

Image by Steve Epting/Marvel Comics

What are Incursions, you ask?

The MCU introduced the idea of Incursions — a cosmic natural disaster in which two universes in the multiverse begin to collide, with the potential to destroy one or both of those universes — in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Stephen Strange visited one universe, where his variant inadvertently created an Incursion. It was then that he was executed. In another universe, he discovered the remains of another Incursion. The only remaining person alive was his own variant. Then, in one of the film’s credits scenes, Strange was accosted by a woman named Clea, who told him that he had caused an Incursion and she’d come to make him fix it.

We don’t know much more about Incursions in the MCU, but in the comics, they were invented by writer Jonathan Hickman as the underpinning threat that eventually led to the 2015 Secret Wars event, which the Marvel Cinematic Universe is headed to adapt in 2026’s Secret Wars: Avengers. In the comics, however, superheroes don’t cause Incursions to happen. They are a multiverse-wide natural disaster, accidentally set into motion by some of Marvel Comics’ nearly omnipotent cosmic beings.

Incursions may seem more like a villainous plot to the MCU, but it could also be an entropic reaction. This is what the Council of Kangs may do.

Image: Marvel Studios

Kang: When are we going to see you again?

The next place we’ll see a Kang variant seems to be in the second season of LokiAccording to Quantumania: Ant-Man and The Wasp’s credits sequence. And it stands to reason he’ll appear in other upcoming Marvel shows and movies before 2025’s Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.

Maybe we’ll see him in MarvelsIn November of this year, Shang-Chi 2Or Coven of Chaos: Agatha in winter 2023 — but Marvel has yet to reveal that Jonathan Majors has signed up for any of those upcoming projects. This is it for the moment: LokiSeason 2 is here.