WARNING: MAJOR spoilers ahead for “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”
Kang the Conqueror made his official debut in the MCU with “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” but, as it turns out, it might’ve been a one-and-done situation — at least for that variant. Then again, Marvel fans have come to know the “no body, no certainty” rule at this point, so it’s hard not to wonder if he’s actually gone. And director Peyton Reed won’t tell you for sure.
“Well, I think that’s the real question. I think you see Scott Lang struggling with that question. And I think it’s, you know, I didn’t actually know that that was a hard, fast rule that if you don’t see the body that doesn’t mean — ” Reed told TheWrap with a laugh.
The film, now in theaters, follows Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and his family through the Quantum Realm, after they’re sucked in by a device his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) created with the help of Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly). There, they meet Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors).
Kang, as we learned in the first season of “Loki,” is one of many, MANY variants of a mysterious being. He’s nearly unstoppable, and this particular version of him was banished to the Quantum Realm, after annihilating multiple worlds. But nearly unstoppable doesn’t mean he can’t be beaten by a team. And that’s exactly what Scott and Hope do.
In keeping him from escaping the Quantum Realm, Scott seemingly destroys Kang by overloading his ship’s energy core, and forcing Kang himself to get sucked into the ensuing Pym Particle reaction. He disappears, and in the mid-credits scene, we see some of Kang’s variants discussing what happened to him.
Of course, like viewers, one of those variants questions whether the conqueror is really dead. And like we said, the MCU so far has taught us that unless you see a dead body, any character that is seemingly killed has the potential to come back. (That said, we’ve definitely seen Loki’s dead body before, and he still came back, so you really just never know). So, we pressed Reed on the matter.
“You don’t really want an answer to that question! You don’t really want an answer to that question. You think you do, but you don’t,” he said.
What Reed would say is that Kang, in his many, many forms, will obviously be very present throughout Phase 5 of the MCU.
“I think Kang, or the Kang variants, are going to be a presence, I mean, in this whole Phase 5. There is a movie coming out called ‘Avengers: Kang Dynasty,’” he said. “What does that mean? I’m not sure, I’m not doing that. We’ll find out. But to me, it was all about Kang the Conqueror, and coming up against these heroes and sort of, you know, them preventing him from getting out of the quantum realm.”
You can watch TheWrap’s full interview with Jonathan Majors in the video above.