In the closing moments of Ant-Man and The Wasp, Janet Van Dyne returned to Earth and used her newfound Quantum superpowers to help heal Ghost.
In a mid-credits scene, however, Scott Lang was sent into the Quantum Realm to retrieve more of the energy needed to stop Ava Starr from vanishing. This seemed to indicate Janet's powers might be finite, but the hope among fans was that Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania might finally reveal how much the original Wasp's time there changed her physiology.
Instead, those Quantum abilities were forgotten, and writer Jeff Loveness has now confirmed they shot scenes with Janet using them which wound up on the cutting room floor.
"Janet’s got obviously those healing properties, but I looked it as more of like, less healing, and more of like, 'Oh, she’s got a bit of that inter-dimensionality phasing as well, and she was able to almost like stabilize Ava.' We wrote that," he explains. "It was in there, and I think it just it was just confusing the viewers in our test screenings like, 'Wait, she has phasing powers?'"
According to Loveness, the plan was to reveal that The Wasp gained her Ghost-like powers after inadvertently stealing them from Kang the Conqueror.
It actually sounds like this was going to be a major subplot in the threequel, as the writer went on to recall a scene with Janet using her powers that was later edited to remove both them and the fallout from her actions.
"There's a part where like they just landed the jungle and Janet pushes him against the tree and says like do not move, and the light goes over them, I think it’s clever editing, but in the script, that was like, she phases them out of sequence, and so the scanner misses them, because she phases them both out, and it really hurts Hope and Hank. And Janet’s in a lot of pain."
"And that was like, 'Oh wait, you can still do that? What is going on down here?' That was almost tied into her traumas like she can’t really control these powers well, being in the Quantum Realm makes her more unstable, and it was a part of that Kang core of like, she made that sacrifice of almost like touching a hot stove, and running away with it, and it really messed her up."
It's a real shame to think such a big character development ended up on the cutting room floor, though we're not sure the movie really had room for it, anyway.
Still, it's odd that what sounds like such an important part of Janet's story was scrapped and we'd hope Marvel Studios will consider revisiting the concept in a future story. Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, perhaps?