At the end of the original Ant-Man movie, Corey Stoll’s villainous character, Yellowjacket, was bested by Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) in Cassie Lang’s bedroom. Our Marvel hero went subatomic so that he could infiltrate Yellowjacket’s suit, destroying it from the inside. And Yellowjacket didn’t collapse, or explode. He just sort of folded in on himself, possibly getting sucked into the Quantum Realm – where Scott had to go in order to stop him.
If you don’t remember, it looked like this:
We didn’t see Corey Stoll’s character, Darren Cross, in the second movie Ant-Man and the Wasp, but he made a significant return in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in a live-action version of the unusual Marvel villain MODOK. The design of the character was… different. MODOK has a very small body and a massive head. But in this case, it was Stoll’s real face, stretched like a bad Photoshop. I loved it, but others took issue with it.
Getting a chance to speak with Stoll following the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, I wanted to know if he always knew that he was going to return following Ant-Man. Because they didn’t kill him. He just… went away. And when it came to what he had bee told, Corey Stoll told CinemaBlend:
The only discussion that I had was, it was on the red carpet for the first movie, at the premier. Kevin Feige came up to me and he said, ‘I just saw you walking down the street in L.A., and I figured out how to bring you back!’ (laugh) And before I was like, ‘How?’ he got pulled away by some reporter or something. I was never able to finish that conversation. I just sort of chalked it up to, you know, there's a million ideas swimming around in his head about how to bring characters back or introduce other ones. … There were different versions of the ending that were filmed for the original Ant-Man. One was, I turned into goo, like the guy that I zapped in the bathroom. I think in the original script, I was just arrested. So this was sort of somewhere in between, which was a good death, but left it open (for me to return).
No one really dies in the MCU. Even a significant character who died in the original Black Panther returned for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and it made sense in the grand scheme of the main story. At the same time, Marvel recently made it clear that major MCU heroes such as Robert Downey Jr. are off the table, allowing new characters to carry the MCU forward.
We will find out more about them as the full slate of Upcoming Marvel Movies start to arrive in theaters, starting with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 opens in May.
