‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ director Peyton Reed on the movie’s ‘Heavy Metal’ inspiration

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On Friday, Marvel Studios’ next big movie goes small — subatomic, actually. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania primarily takes place in the Quantum Realm, the mysterious region far smaller than most have ventured to and has only been glimpsed in the previous movies.

Turns out — according to the film, that is — there’s a whole world in there and a very big threat to our world in the form of Loki veteran Jonathan Majors‘ Kang the Conquerer.

Ant-Man trilogy director Peyton Reed and company, however, needed to build a world for Kang to conquer first, and that took some brainstorming, he explained.

“We looked at everything from electron microscope photography to things like Heavy Metal magazine in the ’70s and ’80s,” Reed explained at a recent press event.

“And we wanted to bring in all these elements, like there’s a little sword and sorcery element, and then there’s a real, like, you know, Moebius element to it,” the filmmaker continued.

“We just wanted to assemble a team of artists and say, ‘We’re creating the Quantum Realm,’ you know? None of the other Marvel movies have really dealt with it, and we want to create this very vivid world that has its own internal history and internal logic and, you know: Who are the creatures there, and who are the people there, and how do you travel? What are the laws of physics? All these things needed to be figured out.”

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania stars returning series actors Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer, as well as Marvel Cinematic Universe newcomer Kathryn Newton as Cassie, the daughter of Rudd’s size-shrinking hero, Scott Lang.

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