Ant-Man, the Wasp, and Quantumania are appropriately named: Between the Quantum Realm’s Ant-Man families and the time-traveling warlord Kang, the Conqueror plenty is going on. That’s not all. The movie ends with an open question. This is all before you see the post-credit scenes.
What does this all mean to the future of the Marvel universe? Avengers The Kang Dynasty, Marvel’s Secret Wars. Let’s find out if these quantum threads can be untangled without beginning any… Controversy.
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Quantumania served as the introduction to Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror. The time-traveling warlord, who will act as the final boss in the following three years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Understandably, he will be confused when he gets his big hand to him at the very end.
Kang is captured in a shrinky portal, which threatens to destroy him. All of Ant-Man and his team make it out of the Quantum Realm. They are all safely back to normal size. The Quantum Realm’s people are freed from tyranny. Scott Lang lives a happy, healthy life.
Or does he?
Is Kang gone?
Polygon spoke to Quantumaniadirector Peyton Reed concerning Kang being given such a prominent role, only to have him die at the end. Reed confirmed the news: Kang is dead.
Reed said that the idea behind this movie’s Kang was to be “the most terrifying, most powerful Kang of them all” — but that meant creating a future threat for all the other Kangs that are seen in that film’s middle-credits scene.
Reed revealed to Polygon that Scott is unaware of secrets in the Ant-Man family at the beginning. All of those secrets are known by the end. Scott Lang is now hiding a secret. It is self-doubt. Kang — Kang is not going to escape the Quantum Realm. Wait, Kang also said that if Kang doesn’t escape, then all these other bad versions will follow. Was I wrongly predicting the end of Earth’s entire population? Scott had to be confronted with this self-doubt, and we were excited to see how it would affect the future of MCU. It’s the hanging note at end of the film.
It seems that Quantumania’s Kang wasn’t a real threat and that there are many wild Kang variants in that arena.
What’s the deal with all those Kangs?!
There is a lot of precedent for the Council of Kangs but we will use what the MCU tells us for our purposes.
He Whoremains was the very first Kang version we met. He was the secret boss and chief of the Time Variance Authority. Loki. He had devoted himself to tight policing the time, removing all variants that would diverge from the “Sacred Timeline”, where he was a unique version of himself who had figured out how to cross the borders between parallel universes. He warned Sylvie & Loki that if he was killed, and free will restored to the universe the timeline would split into a multiverse and eventually all the variants of He Who Remains, would meet and clash, and spiral into an endless time war that would end all life.
Sylvie is killed by He Who Remains at the show’s end. Loki winds up in the following timeline where a Kang Conqueror rules the Time Variance Authority. The Sacred Timeline, which has split into an infinite multiverse with infinitely different parallel worlds, is ruled openly by Kang the Conqueror. He’s also the only one to remember it ever being any other.
In the Quantum Realm, Kang talks about the infinite Kang varieties. He claims that they banished him because he disagreed on the topic of an approaching threat. Ant-Man warned him and his companions that if he did not allow them to rebuild their ship and escape from the Quantum Realm they would have no way to stop the other variants. But he wasn’t clear about the plans of the other versions, the reasons he felt it was wrong, or what the disaster would look like.
We then see Quantumania in the credits scene. This is where we get more conversations between Kangs at the Council of Kangs. Although our information is still a bit vague, we do have one important clue. The Kangas are meeting to discuss Incursions.
Wait, What are Incursions?!
Incursions, a cosmic natural tragedy in which two universes collide in the multiverse, was first introduced by MCU. Stephen Strange visited a universe where his variant caused an Incursion. He was then executed. In another universe, he found the remnants and remains of an Incursion event. The only person who survived was his twisted variant. Clea, a woman, approached Strange and said that he had caused the Incursion. Clea was determined to get him back on track.
We don’t know much about Incursions, but they are a threat to the MCU that was created by Jonathan Hickman. In the comics, Incursions were the underpinning threat that ultimately led to Secret War s 2015 s event. Which the Marvel Cinematic Universe plans to adapt in Avengers Secret Wars 2026. Incursions do not occur in the comics. They are a multiverse-wide natural emergency, caused by an inadvertently created cosmic entity from Marvel Comics.
The MCU could consider Incursions to be more of a villainous plot that an entropic reaction. The Council of Kangs might be one way.
When can we expect to see Kang?
According to Ant-Man & the Wasp Quantumania‘s credits sequence, the next place where we’ll see a Kang-like character is in the second episode of Loki. His appearance in the next Marvel movie and show is likely to be before 2025’s Avengers The Kang Dynasty.
He might be seen in Marvels next November or Shanghai-Chi or Agatha: Covens of Chaos during winter 2023. Marvel has not yet revealed if Jonathan Majors has signed on for any of those projects. For now, Loki is season 2.