Hope’s willingness to treat Cassie like a fellow adult also stems from her frustration with her own mother, Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), whose biggest flaw is may be her failure to treat Hope as an adult capable of handling tough information. Janet has declined to tell Hope anything about her time down in the Quantum Realm, and her lie that there were no other people down there allows Hope, Cassie, and Hank (Michael Douglas) to unwittingly build a trap and walk the whole family right into it. Janet’s inability to be straight with her own daughter makes Hope determined to always play it straight with Cassie, even if that means giving her perhaps a little too much freedom for her age.
“It’s that thing where you want to do the exact opposite thing of what your parents did to hurt you,” Lilly explained. “And so she really lets Cassie in and she gives her a seat at the table and she trusts her with information that maybe she shouldn’t, that maybe is beyond Cassie. But the film will tell us whether or not Cassie should have been trusted with all of that.”
It’s a complicated question, of course. While 18 is technically an adult, it’s also pretty young still, maybe too young for someone to be trusted with such dangerous, advanced technology (Cassie isn’t even old enough to buy a beer in most U.S. states). But as the entire premise of “Quantumania” makes clear, not trusting your kid with anything can put them in even more danger.