It’s easy to see parallels between Marvel and Star Wars (and not just because they’re both owned by Disney). Neither franchise is afraid to lean into the weird and wonderful, which is also something the Ant-Man movies are particularly good at. Peyton Reed also happens to be a director who has worked across both IPs and his time working on The Mandalorian ended up having a big influence on his latest Marvel film, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
In Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantamania, Scott Lang and his family are flung into the depths of the Quantum Realm, a mysterious world that is yet to be fully explored in the MCU.
“It was a big thing as we set out to design the Quantum Realm and what it was,” Reed told Kotaku Australia while in Sydney.
“We knew we wanted to go further down. Scott Lang in the first movie got stuck in this sort of void at the upper reaches that he was able to get out of. In the second movie, Hank went beyond the void to this area where Janet had sent these coordinates to meet. This time we wanted to go through that and further down.”
The Quantum Realm was the perfect place for Reed to test the boundaries of his imagination, particularly coming off the back of a trip to a galaxy far far away. The director helmed two episodes of The Mandalorian in between Ant-Man films, including the much-praised season 2 finale that included the surprise return of a famous Jedi.
Reed said it was the “thrill of a lifetime” to direct Star Wars and that his time working on the Disney+ series gave him a few ideas for Quantumania.
“[Lucasfilm] use this technology that was developed by ILM called StageCraft. It’s called the Volume and it’s a 360-degree stage of LED panels, which they use on [The Mandalorian],” he explained. “It looks like they’re shooting on location. It’s very photo-real, but it’s all done on stage.”
This experience working with the Volume was something that Reed carried with him onto the new Ant-Man film and allowed the mysterious Quantum Realm to be fleshed out with more creativity and detail.
“We felt like there were certain specific applications for parts of the Quantum Realm that might be good for the movie. So we definitely used it as one of the tools in our toolkit to create these environments,” Reed continued.
“The actors love it because they can actually not just look and see a piece of tape on a blue screen, they see some environment, or some creature, or some element that’s actually there, and they can react to it. So for performance and for active light it was really great.”
Early reactions to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania have pointed out the Marvel film feels very similar to Star Wars. As it turns out there might be more than one reason why.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania releases in Australian cinemas on February 16.
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