By now, we know that the end-credits scene of Peyton Reed's Ant-Man and the Wasp occurs during the "Snappening" of Avengers: Infinity War. But Evangeline Lilly just elaborated on a key bit of the scene that was cut because it changed the tone dramatically, explaining:
I kind of got a giggle when I saw the final product, because they basically just cut our reactions out completely and cut to ash, which is, of course, much more dramatic and worked very well for the scene, but also is probably a result of the fact that we totally blew it. [laughs] None of [us] knew what we were doing! I think we made it look a little bit more like an ascension to heaven [rather] than any sort of negative and scary happening.
Evangeline Lilly, who plays new Wasp Hope van Dyne in the Ant-Man movies, has been making the press rounds in support of the movie's DVD and Blu-ray release. And she mentioned how she didn't know that she was going to get dusted -- alongside Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer -- in the mid-credits sequence of Ant-Man and the Wasp.
So, the way she tells it to CBR, they probably filmed their reaction to the dusting in different ways. And they hadn't yet seen Avengers: Infinity War. So they didn't know that the dusting was tragic. And that meant their reactions had to be cut out of this pivotal scene. As Lilly elaborates:
We were in this sort of awkward position of shooting something that --- we knew, like, the basic idea. We knew that Thanos had snapped his fingers and people disappeared, but we didn't know... I hadn't seen Tom Holland crying out and begging Iron Man to 'Please, please, I don't want to go, I don't want to go,' and we hadn't seen the emotion or the drama or the sort of angst and maybe pain surrounding the ashing or the Snappening when we were shooting it. I don't think [director] Peyton [Reed] really even knew what that was supposed to look like or be, because none of us had been a part of Avengers: Infinity War.
So, they winged it. And they probably got it wrong. And therefor, their reaction scenes were trimmed.
Ultimately, it's fine. The point of the scene is to get Paul Rudd's character, Scott Lang, into the Quantum Realm at the end of the movie. We think this will be very important to Avengers 4, because Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) explains to Scott about time vortexes, saying they are bad. But really, we think they will be key to reversing what Thanos (Josh Brolin) pulled off in Avengers: Infinity War.
We'll find out once Avengers 4 opens in theaters on May 3, 2019. And if you want to know everything that's coming to theaters next year, bookmark our 2019 Movie Release Calendar, and check it often!
