It’s going to happen eventually, but at this point no Marvel movie has been fronted by a female superhero. We’ll get Captain Marvel in 2019, but before that we will see a female character as the co-headliner in the upcoming Ant-Man and the Wasp when Evangeline Lilly’s Hope Van Dyne steps into the Wasp role previously held by her mother. But will she eventually branch out on her own and get a solo film? The answer is a firm maybe.
Most known for comedies like Anchorman, writer/director Adam McKay is up for an Oscar for his financial world ensemble dramedy The Big Short. He helped pen Ant-Man with star Paul Rudd, and while he’s down to contribute to Ant-Man and the Wasp, he hasn’t been asked yet. Though his involvement remains a question mark, IGN did ask him about the possibility of a Wasp solo adventure, to which he replied:
Possibly. I think it all depends on this sequel and how the character plays. Certainly there’s a lot of female superheroes in the Marvel universe so I’m sure you’re going to see them start to spread out. They sort of started with their kind of bedrock characters from the 60s and the 70s and I think you saw more of an explosion of female characters happening in the 80s and then the 90s. X-Men obviously has great female characters, but that’d be interesting, a Wasp movie. I don’t know, that’d be very interesting. I always think of the two of them as kind of together – they always were in the comics – but why not. Sure.
Like we said before, a hard maybe.
As is the case with most of their stable of superheroes, we’ll likely see Hope Van Dyne pop up elsewhere in the MCU, especially once she fully takes the Wasp role. Where, however, is up in the air at the moment. Aside from co-leading Ant-Man and the Wasp in 2018, we don’t know where we’ll see her next, as she is, at the present time, not slated to show up anywhere else that we know about.
Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man will play a part later this year in Captain America: Civil War, and will, by all accounts, become a bigger player in the MCU as it continues to move towards the two-part Avengers: Infinity War event.
As Marvel moves into Phase 3, their schedule is pretty set at this point, so while there are places the Wasp could show up and play a role, especially as the character has been a big part of the Avengers over the years, a solo movie may not be a realistic possibility for a few years. As Adam McKay points out, a lot of her action has been as part of a team or with a partner, so it will be interesting to see if Marvel even wants to branch out and give her a movie of her own. There’s certainly been an outcry for more female-led comic book movies, and Wasp would be a great character to spend more time with.
We’ll see how all of this plays out, but for now, Hope Van Dyne/Wasp will show up again when Ant-Man and the Wasp opens July 6, 2018.
