Georgia wasn’t the only conqueror on Monday night.
During the CFP National Championship on Monday night, played between Georgia and TCU, Marvel Studios premiered a new trailer for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the next film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the third in the Ant-Man series.
The trailer offered new glimpses at the movie’s most crucial elements, from the strange world contained in the Quantum Realm to Jonathan Major’s Kang the Conqueror, a villain positioned to become the next major menace in the MCU. Observe the trailer declaring: “Witness the beginning of a new dynasty,” an obvious allusion to Avengers: The Kang Dynasty in 2025.
But perhaps the most important angle the trailer reveals about Quantumania is the plot. While fans already know the broad strokes — Cassie (Kathryn Newton) gets sucked into the Quantum Realm, requiring Team Ant-Man to rescue her — the new trailer shows Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) cutting some kind of deal with Kang. It seems Kang wants something unobtainable, and Scott, being a professional thief, is the man to get it for him. Should he agree, he’ll get to spend more time with the most important person to him.
“You have a daughter. But you’ve lost a lot of time. Like me,” says Kang to Scott. “We can help each other with that.”
You can watch the trailer below.
Not unlike Ryan Coogler’s original scrapped script for Wakanda Forever, Quantumania follows Scott Lang lamenting the post-Blip loss of time with his daughter. Kang can promise Scott that he can have that time again. But is the price too big for Ant-Man to pay?
Meanwhile, Quantumania is shaping up to be a far more serious movie than the previous Ant-Man films. With greater emphasis on Scott struggling to be a father over a now-young adult Cassie, and the threat of Kang all-important to the MCU as a whole, Quantumania has an unusually weighty and pressing tone not present in Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp. See the gravity to which Ant-Man is willing to sacrifice himself if it means Kang doesn’t get what he wants. It seems working on The Mandalorian has put some spurs in director Peyton Reed’s boots.
Despite being light on laughs, Quantumania has no shortage of Marvel’s signature goods to offer. The Quantum Realm looks gorgeous as a Jack Kirby-esque fever dream, and certainly there’ll finally be some answers to the widespread speculation that the Quantum Realm has something to do with Shang-Chi’s Ten Rings and Ms. Marvel’s wrist bangles. The new trailer doesn’t offer any real answers about those mysteries, but it’s only a matter of time before it does.
The threat of Kang matters not just because the MCU is in danger, but because Cassie is now directly involved. Adhering to the comics, Cassie is suiting up in a superhero costume of her own. Whether her superhero name will be Stature (which her comic book counterpart used in Young Avengers) or Stinger, a name she adopted after her resurrection, remains to be seen. (Yes, she’s died before in comics, which doesn’t bode well for her fate in Quantumania.) But even if Cassie lives, Scott will be a changed man, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe will never be the same.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania opens in theaters on February 17.
