Marvel has been holding its cards very close to the vest with the marketing for “Ant-Man and the Wasp” — they’ve avoided even hinting at any big picture Marvel Cinematic Universe connections or even the fact that any part of this story will involve Janet Van Dyne, who has been lost in the “quantum realm” for decades. But they may be letting loose a little bit with this new spot, which aired during the World Cup match between Mexico and Germany Sunday morning.
The 30-second spot opens with a full ten seconds of footage from “Avengers: Infinity War,” with the narrator saying: “Everything you know, everything you’ve experienced, has all led to this.” And then it cuts to a scene in which Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) incredulously asks Luis (Michael Pena) why his desk is so small. It’s a fun spot, and you can watch it in the video embedded at the top of this post.
While the “Infinity War” stuff is almost certainly just a gag, this is the second time that the marketing folks at Marvel and Disney have tied the two films together somehow. A few days after “Infinity War” came out back in April, they dropped a sort of teaser for the second “Ant-Man and the Wasp” trailer in which a bunch of Marvel heroes cracked jokes about where the duo were during Thanos’ invasion of Earth.
But nothing in any of the ads so far have given off any tangible hint of a connection. Or at least not that we can tell without having seen the movie — there’s always a chance that they’ve been showing us important things that we don’t yet know the significance of, like how the “Infinity War” marketing was full of shots of the very end of the movie.
But we know there’s way more to “Ant-Man and the Wasp” than the marketing has let on. They cast Michelle Pfeiffer as Janet Van Dyne, which means she’s in this movie — and she’s also in next year’s “Avengers 4,” so she’s definitely important.
It’s also logical to assume that Marvel would not follow up such a massive cliffhanger like the one “Infinity War” had with a totally irrelevant side movie. “Ant-Man and the Wasp” will almost certainly be an important piece of the larger MCU story.
But until we actually see the whole movie with our own eyeballs, we’re stuck making wild guesses. Which we have done here at TheWrap. Click here for some of the possibilities we came up with for how “Ant-Man and the Wasp” may tie in to everything that went down in “Avengers: Infinity War.” You may also want to check out our discussion of how next year’s “Captain Marvel” film will fit in to all this.