Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is on its way to wowing the Marvel universe, but there are a lot of questions the film's trailer raises. Like, how did Cassie Lang end up making that awesome Quantum satellite? Did Janet Van Dyne steal something from Kang? And what exactly does Kang want that Ant-Man can get him? These aren’t questions that any amount of teaser footage will likely answer until Quantumania hits the screens, but we can always speculate. Here we plan to find out just what Ant-Man’s uneasy relationship with Kang is and how he might have orchestrated this entire situation.
Through well-placed hints and subtle motivations, Kang may have created a whole set of circumstances that led to this very moment. Kang, or at least this version of Kang, could have been sitting in his fortress, deep beneath the world of reality, and through a series of minimal actions, manipulated Scott Lang into coming down to the Quantum Realm to help him. But why? What has Kang lost? And how can Scott get it back?
We’ll explore fan theories about how Kang might have secretly made all of these events possible and try to understand more about the MCU’s new big villain.
Is Cassie Lang Working With Kang?
At the beginning of the new trailer for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Cassie Lang unveils a device she’s built that can transmit a signal down to the Quantum Realm. It’s fairly logical that Cassie might have made something like this since, during the Blip, she might have figured out that her father was trapped in the Quantum Realm. Or even after the Blip, when Scott Lang returned to the world of the big folk, Cassie may have been working on something like this just in case these series of events ever happened again. Either way, it’s a useful tool if you’re trapped in the Quantum Realm and have no way of getting out unless someone in the normal-sized world knows you’re there.
But Cassie says one thing that interests fans, “I built it with him.” Obviously, that could mean anything. It could mean she’s been working on the project with Hank Pym since her father’s escape from the Quantum Realm, or it could mean she’s been working with some other MCU scientist or kid-genius without any of the Ant-Family knowing about it. Either way, Cassie didn’t build this thing on her own. After all, she’s only a kid. But it’s possible she spent her time after the snap studying Pym’s quantum research and learning about the Quantum Realm, which is the fruit of her research. But who was she working with?
It could have been someone like Bruce Banner or Dr. Bill Foster. It could have even been Tony Stark. Regardless of who, whatever Cassie needed to complete the device might have come from communications she received after she began testing it. And if it’s a machine designed to talk to the Quantum Realm, Cassie could have been talking to Kang. This version of Kang might have heard Cassie transmit to the Quantum Realm.
Since he’s stuck there, could Kang have given her a key that made it work and added something extra that allowed him to open that portal we see in the trailer? It could have been a component to trap whatever scientist was working on that device down in the Quantum Realm so they could help him escape.
What Does Kang Want?
We might assume that this variant of Kang is trapped in the Quantum Realm simply because if he wasn’t, he would have already grown in size and conquered Earth-616. But something was “taken” from him. In his giant (or tiny) fortress of spinning rings and advanced technology, Kang has been waiting to get out of his quantum prison and fulfill his title as a conqueror.
When Cassie Lang activates her satellite-type device and explains that she is transmitting a signal down to the quantum realm, Janet is the first to react. She immediately tells Cassie to stop but realizes it’s already too late. As viewers will recall, Janet was trapped in the Quantum Realm for years before Hank and Scott got her back in Ant-Man and the Wasp. Janet is clearly aware of the dangers down there. Whether those dangers she knew about were Kang the Conqueror or just Bill Murray, remains to be seen. But for the sake of speculation, let’s say Janet knows about Kang.
If she knew that Kang was down there, planning, she must have felt pretty secure that he would remain in the Quantum Realm if she never told anyone about him. But why? Why is Kang stuck in the Quantum Realm? With all of his future technology, he should have been able to engineer something that would get him out of this predicament. It’s possible that Janet might have stolen a key component from Kang, keeping him trapped. And now Scott has to get this technology back from Janet to save his daughter.