Peyton Reed Reveals More about the Quantum Realm, Including a Deleted Scene

Ant-Man and the Wasp is officially out for digital release, and there are a ton of special features to entertain and inform Marvel Cinematic Universe fans. From a gag reel to deleted scenes, and even a special commercial for a certain online magic school, Ant-Man and the Wasp still has a lot of laughs to deliver. To celebrate the film’s home release, director Peyton Reed entertained some of our questions about the second installment of the Ant-Man franchise.

In a conversation with CBR, Reed told us as much as he could about the mysterious Janet van Dyne, the Quantum Realm, and where he recommends pausing the film to study interesting details.

CBR: There is still a lot of mystery around Janet’s character -- about the nature of her character and how she’s been affected by the quantum realm. What do you make of the different speculations that she might be a villain down the line?

Peyton Reed: We had so many discussions as we were first formulating the story. It was the big question in the movie: is Janet still alive down there after 30 years? Who is she now? How's she been affected by the environment? It was the one thing that we really sort of had to formulate, what was going to happen to her, what it was going to lead to next, and how much of that we reveal in this movie.

I can say that it was certainly one of the things that we talked about. If I say or reveal anything more about Janet, there’s going to be a Marvel sniper that’s going to shoot me in the neck with a tranquilizer.

Can you elaborate a little bit more on the deleted scene with Janet leading Hank around the Quantum Realm and encountering an intelligent life form?

Reed: The scene that you’ll see is they’re making their way back to Hank’s quantum pod, and they have an encounter with a quantum creature. She’s able to sort of negotiate a momentary truce by communicating with this creature instead of fighting it or something. We mostly cut it for time and for momentum.

But it was a fun little detail to see kind of a glimpse, you know, she hasn’t just been sitting around for 30 years waiting to be rescued. She has a whole life down there, and this is just one little glimpse at an interaction she has with a creature down there. So, it was really sort of finding that line in the final cut of the movie as to how much to reveal about the Quantum Realm itself and her place in it.

Where do you recommend we pause the movie to get more information on something we may not have known or details that’ll get us to know the characters better?

I’ll point you to a couple of things. I think in the scenes where Hank, Hope and Scott are in Hank’s laboratory, there are a lot of details in the production design in terms of items that were large items that were shrunken, there were shrunken items that were grown, in terms of pieces used to create Hank’s laboratory. So think pausing and looking around at the various details with all these things, you may notice some strange items that are used to construct his laboratory.

And then I would also say in the Quantum Realm, as Hank and Janet blast their way out of the Quantum Realm in the quantum pod, maybe freeze frame on some of those, and see if you can see anything in the distance in the Quantum Realm.

We’re going to need a big screen then!

Reed: [Laughs] Yes, the biggest screen you can find!

Director Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man and The Wasp stars Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Peña, Tip “T.I.” Harris, Judy Greer, David Dastmalchian, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Laurence Fishburne, Hannah John-Kamen, Randall Park and Walton Goggins. The film will be available Oct. 16 on Blu-ray and DVD.