Kevin Feige Reveals What Will Happen in Potential ANT-MAN Sequel

Warning: this piece will contain spoilers for Ant-Man.

Marvel Studios already has their film slate planned out for the next few years, and one movie that isn't officially scheduled yet is a sequel to Ant-Man. Looking at the studio's track record, though, every character who was introduced in a standalone film except for The Incredible Hulk has received a sequel, so unless Ant-Man tanks at the box office, it's a good bet that we'll see star Paul Rudd get a shot at a sequel of his own. But what will happen in that sequel?

Here's where things get spoilery.

In Ant-Man, there's a brief flashback scene featuring the character of Janet Van Dyne as The Wasp in action. Michael Douglas' Hank Pym explains that while he was still operating as Ant-Man back in the day, Janet would accompany him on some missions, but one mission went bad: Janet heroically saved the day by shrinking down even further than normal in order to stop a rogue missile, but in the process, she was lost in the quantum realm — a place where all sense of time and reality cease to exist as you continue to shrink endlessly. Pym is haunted by this, and it's a big part of why he doesn't want his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) to don the Ant-Man suit herself, leading to him reaching out to Rudd's Scott Lang character instead.

This past weekend, I was invited to the film's press day on the Disney lot in Burbank, and after the press conference was over, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige was asked if we'd be seeing more of Janet in future films. Here's what he said:

If we get to tell more stories, we have stories with her in them, yes.

So Feige is waiting to see how this film does at the box office before he officially confirms that a sequel is on the way, but there are definitely plans in place to explore what happened to Janet, including (and I'm speculating here) the possibility of her returning from the quantum realm. The film goes out of its way to hide the character's face (even in a shot of a family photo, her face is obscured by a hat), so Marvel could end up casting anyone they want in the role whenever they're ready to dive deeper into her story. And perhaps the most interesting part is that the traditional rules of time may not necessarily apply in the quantum realm, so theoretically they could cast someone much younger than Douglas to play her as she bursts back into the normal realm and that age gap would add a whole new dynamic to that relationship.

Ant-Man arrives in theaters on July 17th.