The Marvel Cinematic Universe has already introduced a couple of badass female superheroes, like Black Widow and Scarlet Witch, but they have yet to release a standalone movie with a female superhero. Captain Marvel will be their first female superhero to get a standalone movie. However, that movie isn't coming out any sooner than March 8, 2019.
But Ant-Man and the Wasp, which will be released before Captain Marvel, is the first MCU installment to feature the name of a female superhero in the title.
And Peyton Reed, who is set to return as the director of the Ant-Man sequel, claims that Evangeline Lilly's Hope van Dyne, aka the Wasp, won't have any less important a role in the movie than Paul Rudd's character.
In a recent interview with Modern Myth Media, the director says:
For me as a comic nerd, I always thought of Ant-Man and Wasp as a team, and that's a lot of what the second movie is really about…how they work together, what their personal and professional relationships are like.
The director reveals that he is really excited to show Lilly's character as "finally fully formed" in Ant-Man and the Wasp. He adds:
We really get to introduce this character into that universe. I mean we've introduced the character, but we haven't seen her with her full power set and everything, so to me she's not a supporting character in this movie. It's every bit as much her movie as it is Scott Lang's.
Ant-Man appeared in the recently released Captain America: Civil War, and the movie treated us to a big surprise related to Rudd's character: his Giant Man form. This is something that Peyton Reed didn't get to use in the Ant-Man movie. Was he green with envy to see that the Russo Brothers got to run that play first?
Indeed he was! The director says, “I was like, ‘Oh my God, they get to do the Giant Man reveal!' I had a little bit of a professional envy going on. But I'm thrilled! I love the Giant Man stuff in the movie.”
According to Peyton Reed, the fact that so many people have seen Civil War is "gonna be great" for them. He also promises to have "so much more in store" for Ant-Man and the Wasp.
At the end of Civil War, we saw Paul Rudd's character as a Raft prison escapee and global fugitive. Ant-Man and the Wasp can't simply ignore that event. They can't start now from where they left off at the end of Ant-Man.
However, Peyton Reed seems confident enough to deal with it. He explains:
Well, he's a fugitive in most of the first Ant-Man movie. He's just a bigger fugitive now. I think that's one of the fun things and challenges about the Marvel movies for us, for the directors, and for the writers…you do have to sort of consider what happened in the previous movies in terms of your jumping-off point for those characters.
About the return of Michael Peña's Luis and the rest of the Antourage for Ant-Man and the Wasp: The director claims that there's "a fighting chance" for that to happen.
