Peyton Reed

WARNING: If you haven’t seen ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ yet, this article will include significant spoilers. If you care about such things, bookmark this article and get to the nearest theater as soon as possible!

Once it was decided that Janet Van Dyne – the original incarnation of the Wasp – would play a significantly larger role in ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ than she had in the original film, it was clear that there were some questions the film would have to answer. Chief among them: “What happened to Janet while she was trapped in the Quantum Realm?”

And suffice to say, she seems to have emerged a changed woman. In addition to her newfound healing abilities – which prove instrumental to the film’s climax – she’s also had some thirty years of experiences in the Quantum Realm, a place where things like time and physics are known to work differently. In addition to discussions on whether or not she should have aged during that time, the film’s development process included discussions of just how her time in the Quantum Realm would affect her. And as director Peyton Reed explained to Cinema Blend, there was an extent to which the answer to that question involved playing against not only the expectations of the audience, but of the characters:

“She’s evolved down there. I like the idea that maybe in Hope’s mind she’s going to learn how to fight and how to be a hero from her mom, but what her mom really is ultimately going to teach her is that there are other ways, right? We only dispense a certain amount of information about what’s happened to Janet in the Quantum Realm by design, but maybe one of those things, in terms of how she’s evolved, is a larger perspective on what it means to be a hero.”

Helmed by returning director Peyton Reed, ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ stars Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Pena, Walton Goggins, Bobby Cannavale, Judy Greer, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Laurence Fishburne. The film is now playing in theaters.