‘Ant-Man And The Wasp’ Takes Place Pre-‘Infinity War’ And Is Compared To Scorsese’s ‘After Hours’

Even though “Avengers: Infinity War” is still bringing in money for Marvel Studios and Disney, with over $2 billion worldwide, it’s time to move on and focus on the next chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – “Ant-Man and the Wasp.” And as is customary during this part of the Disney Marketing Machine, set-visits are starting to hit the Internet, with juicy bits of information that we’ve been wanting to know.

Thanks to the good folks at Slash Film, we now know a little bit more about the upcoming superhero flick. Particularly, we now have an answer to the big question – How does it fit with ‘Infinity War?’ The answer is basically, it doesn’t…yet.

Director Peyton Reed explains that this film definitely falls into the void between “Captain America: Civil War” and ‘Infinity War:’

“We definitely had to deal with the ramifications post-‘Civil War.’ That was crucial to Scott [Lang] and crucial to Hope [van Dyne]. I mean, it really is fundamental in the jumping-off point about what’s going on between the two of them at the start of this movie. Outside of that, what I’m really happy about is we’re free to tell sort of our freestanding story. Once we establish that as the leaping-off point, this thing is going on over here with huge personal stakes and huge other stakes that are really separate of what’s going on with ‘Infinity War.’ So that is something that was really, really appealing to me. We have enough stuff to track in this movie without having to keep abreast of what’s going on in that.”

Another question surrounding the film before its release is the genre. Obviously, it’s a superhero film, and firmly falls under the capes and spandex genre, however, the first film in the series was a superhero film first and a heist film second. This time around, executive producer Stephen Broussard says it’s not a heist film, but another type of movie altogether:

“The first film was a heist film, right? It was kind of this crime movie, and we like that the ‘Ant-Man’ franchise kind of lives in this crime-adjacent world, and so a lot of the films that we started talking about just as like inspiration – and kind of how we want to approach it and how we want to do something new the same way the heist movie felt new to the MCU – I don’t really know if it’s a genre unto itself but movies that have always been kind of ‘one bad night,’ when something just goes terrible and just kind of spirals out of control. ‘After Hours’ is a great touchstone. I like ‘Go.’ ‘Go’ is a great movie. You know, ‘Adventures in Babysitting’ for the lighter fare. It just feels like it started so simple but then it kind of just goes up and up and up, and then you have a character trying to race to put it all back in the box before they get caught.”

The producer also goes into detail about how the villains play a role in the film. Unlike the first “Ant-Man,” the sequel has multiple villains (including one we don’t know about yet…). So, how will the film juggle all those antagonists?

“I’m a big Elmore Leonard fan, in the way that there’s all these sort of colorful characters kind of colliding with one another,” says Broussard. “That feels crime-adjacent, to use that term again, and so we wanted to populate this movie with a lot of antagonists. Not so much people that are like villains or supervillains, but like obstacles in the way. They have their own agendas, their own journeys. They’re not trying to take over the world but they’re clearly standing in the way of our heroes, and Elmore Leonard was such a master at that. The ‘Get Shortys’ of the world. Everybody is in a circle trying to get somewhere else and just colliding in the middle and that was a huge inspiration for the tone and the framework of where this movie could go.”

And speaking about the unknown big bad of the film, Reed says, “there is a big bad that has a very unique relationship to our characters.” Hmmmm. Some are positing that it could be Lawrence Fishburne’s character, Bill Foster. But that would be a big departure from the source material.

We’ll find out when “Ant-Man and the Wasp” hits theaters July 6.