It took eight years and some “Avengers” side quests before Rudd’s kernel of an idea came to fruition, but it finally will in the film that sees Scott, his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), Evangeline Lilly’s Wasp, and her parents (Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas) deal with some reality-bending fallout when Cassie’s quantum satellite project goes awry.
Feige says the quantum realm is “a place that’s on the subatomic level where space and time act differently,” and points out that it’s the same space that allowed heroes to navigate through the time-hopping plot of “Avengers: Endgame.” It sounds like the quantum realm is also prone to some instability, though, as Feige mentions a “manic quantumness” that only Pfieffer’s Janet has ever experienced before. “There is an entire universe below the surface where we meet all sorts of fun, crazy characters,” he explains.
While Marvel’s vision of the quantum realm may not be appearing in science textbooks anytime soon, it is a real place where particles act in ways that are counter-intuitive to what centuries of knowledge once told us. Quantum mechanics is still a developing field, but what we know so far is pretty trippy. Quantum entanglement, for example, is a phenomenon in which two particles are linked across time and space, while quantum superposition involves (in the simplest of terms) particles that initially appear to be in two places at once.
Rudd’s comments about the potential for imaginative storytelling in the quantum realm, then, likely come not from any Marvel comic book (though “Ant-Man” comics have a similar space called the Microverse), but from prior knowledge of quantum mechanics. He’s talented and charming and he can probably explain Schrödinger’s Cat?! What can’t this guy do?
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” hits theaters on February 17, 2023.