After hanging out with the Avengers next year in Captain America: Civil War, Ant-Man will get to go on his own adventure again, but this time he won’t be hogging the spotlight all for himself. Hope van Dyne will finally get the chance to shine as a superhero by following in her mother’s footsteps and becoming The Wasp. Ant-Man and the Wasp will be the first Marvel movie to feature a duo as the main leads, putting Wasp on equal level as Ant-Man just like in their old comic book stories, and Peyton Reed wouldn’t have it any other way.
While Reed acknowledged that titling the sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp was a way to incorporate a female hero in a lead role before Captain Marvel is released, he also told Yahoo! that putting her at the forefront was also just organic to the story. As he put it:
Her last line in the movie — ‘It’s about damn time’ — [is] very much about her specific character and arc in that movie, but it is absolutely about a larger thing. It’s about damn time: We’re going to have a fully realized, very very complicated hero in the next movie who happens to be a woman.
Hope certainly played a key role in Ant-Man. With her father Hank Pym, she helped prepare Scott Lang for breaking into Cross Industries and retrieving the stolen shrinking technology. Things didn’t go according to plan, but they were able to beat Darren Cross, a.k.a. Yellowjacket, in the end. However, Hope made it clear to Hank throughout the movie that she was just as capable of using the Ant-Man suit herself, but he didn’t let her for fear that he might lose her like he lost her mother Janet. Fortunately, by the mid-credits scene, he changed his mind and unveiled to Hope an upgraded Wasp suit that was hers to use, which we now know was setting her up for Ant-Man and the Wasp. Wasp is the third female superhero in the MCU to be introduced on the big screen, following Black Widow and Scarlet Witch.
Hope van Dyne proved herself to be an impressive fighter in Ant-Man, but as The Wasp, she’ll have more tools in her arsenal to fight crime, like being able to shrink (duh) and shooting stun blasts. It hasn’t been announced which threat Ant-Man and Wasp will be fighting together in the sequel, but as they say, two heads are better than one. Depending on how this movie goes, perhaps fans will also get to see Hope as one of the many heroes who will battle Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War.
Ant-Man and the Wasp hits theaters on July 6, 2018.
