We've heard rumblings that Marvel Studios considered killing Michael Douglas' Hank Pym in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, but like every other major character, he emerged from the Quantum Realm unscathed.
Aside from Scott Lang's fears that he made a terrible mistake by not helping Kang the Conqueror escape, the threequel was largely consequence-free. Douglas has repeatedly said he's ready to bid farewell to the original Ant-Man and writer Jeff Loveness has now revealed new details about Hank's scrapped demise.
"We were going to kill Hank at one point, and I was going to have him be, like, reanimated," he tells Backstory Magazine. "His consciousness was going to live on through the ants, and he was going to be like mentally controlling them. Yeah, he was going to be almost like this hive mind of the ants, and I like that...that didn't go too far."
If that sounds like a quirky story, then it pales in comparison to what Loveness had planned for that probability storm.
"I had like a big man-sized ant that was going to be almost like a ninja turtle, the way they looked in that 90s movie, not CGI, make it almost like a Cronenberg 'The Fly'-like Ant. And it was like in his head. I wanted it to be voiced by Werner Herzog and give it some sort of Holy Mountain kind of advice, some Vision Quest thing."
As a former writer on Rick and Morty, Loveness clearly brought a lot of weird ideas to the table and was reigned in somewhat by Marvel Studios.
While it would have been a shame to bid farewell to Hank in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, this sounds like a novel approach to his death and a fitting farewell to the hero. Instead, he's sticking around, though we have a feeling both he and Janet will be among Kang's first victims in Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.
Also written by Loveness, that movie arrives in theaters on May 2, 2025, while Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania hits Digital on April 18 and Blu-ray on May 16.