With Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania now playing in theaters, we're sure you're just as anxious as we are to know where the Multiverse Saga will take us next. We'll be delving into that in the coming days, but for now, it's time to better explore the events of this movie.
Filmmaker Peyton Reed's opening chapter for Phase 5 doesn't deliver quite as many answers about Kang and the Multiverse as we'd have liked, but there are still plenty of significant developments...and some surprising casualties!
In this feature, we're taking a look at who lives and who dies in the Marvel Studios threequel, breaking down their respective fates and diving into what all that means for the MCU. With Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars on the horizon, everything we see here promises to be massively important.
Seismic spoilers for Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania follow from this point on, so you'll need to hit the "Next" button below to check them out.
The Ant-Man Family: ALIVE
The trailers may have left you thinking Scott Lang would meet his maker in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, but each member of the Ant-Man family manages to survive this trip into the Quantum Realm.
Hank is put through the wringer trying to protect his wife, while Janet is someone Kang is keen to make pay for trapping him in the Quantum Realm. Despite that, they both live, as does Hope (who mostly takes a back seat until she helps Scott defeat the time-travelling villain).
As you might expect, Cassie Lang also lives to fight another day, no great surprise when the stage is being set for her to become a superhero in her own right. She's never given a moniker in this movie, however.
M.O.D.O.K.: DEAD
When Scott and Cassie first encounter M.O.D.O.K., they learn Darren Cross was pulled into the Quantum Realm and left hideously deformed. Kang "rescued" him and turned the former Yellowjacket into a Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing, and he takes great delight in tormenting our heroes.
After being tasked with killing Cassie, M.O.D.O.K. is beaten by the teenager and told to stop being a "dick." He seems to take that to heart and helps our heroes stop Kang, only for the explosion from the villain's force field to leave him mortally wounded.
As he lies there dying, Darren talks nonsense about Scott always being like a brother to him, shares happiness at being an Avenger, and then passes away a "hero." It's a weird moment and one that takes the villain off the table for future stories.
Kang The Conqueror: DEAD
Yes, Marvel Studios introduces Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, only to kill the villain before the credits roll.
Intent on retrieving the Multiversal Power Core shrunk by Janet prior to her escape from the Quantum Realm, Kang eventually regains that and sets out to escape his exile along with the army he's created. Overcome by the technologically advanced ants also inadvertently pulled into the Quantum Realm, the villain is badly injured when he faces Scott Lang.
Ant-Man takes the fight to Kang but finds himself overpowered even with his foe in this weakened state. Just as the time-traveller is about to escape, though, The Wasp shows up and blasts Kang until he's sucked into the power core. With that, he's dead and gone.
Or is he?
...Wait, Is He Really Dead, Though?
We're not discounting the possibility that Kang has survived his apparent demise, especially as a device powerful enough to traverse the Multiverse has the potential to imbue him with incredible new powers.
With rumours swirling that Avengers: Secret Wars will introduce The Beyonder (who is also a Kang Variant), we have a feeling that is where the Conqueror will return. With the Multiversal Power Core now part of him, Kang will be able to shape reality to his whim, something that's bound to pose a major problem for Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
The again, he may just be dead. The mid-credits scene introduces the Council of Kangs led by Immortus, Rama-Tut, and the Scarlet Centurion, so they may well be the MCU's new big bads.
What Comes Next
To some extent, your guess is as good as ours at this point! Marvel Studios is either very deliberately keeping its cards close to the vest or making the Multiverse Saga up as it goes; either way, we can't help but think Kang's demise is significant.
He explains throughout the course of this movie that only he can stop what's coming, with the worlds he's previously conquered among those created by the actions of his many Variants. In fact, by destroying timelines, he's actually helped stop incursions...it's just a shame these seemingly heroic actions involve killing trillions.
With Ant-Man praised as a hero for saving the universe when this movie begins, we wrap the story up with Scott worrying whether stopping Kang from escaping really has, in fact, doomed everyone. If he truly is responsible, that could be an amazing arc for the character as we head deeper into the Multiverse Saga...