Those who thought Peyton Reed's Ant-Man and the Wasp was a simple, inconsequential, sidelined adventure were almost wrong. The 2018 film opened to relatively positive reviews, with our own Conner Schwerdtfeger calling it "slightly less even and narratively tight" than its 2015 predecessor. But what nearly happened in Avengers: Endgame could've made it Hope van Dyne's cat who saved Ant-Man from an eternity in the Quantum Realm rather than a curious rat.
For those who have no clue why it matters if it was a cat or a rat that inadvertently saved the universe (kind of a stretch, but not really), let me explain: In the mid-credits scene of Ant-Man and the Wasp, Scott Lang returns to the Quantum Realm to obtain energy while Hank Pym and Janet and Hope van Dyne monitor his mission. Over in Wakanda, Thanos snaps his gauntleted fingers and Hope, Hank, and Janet disintegrate. Early in Avengers: Endgame, the van housing the equipment used to transport people to the Quantum Realm collects dust in a storage unit when a rat hurries across some vital buttons, pressing one and bringing Lang back to reality (literally).
When The Hollywood Reporter asked Ant-Man and the Wasp co-writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers about connective tissue in the MCU, they relayed a story about Hope van Dyne's missing cat. Chris McKenna said:
We were working on Ant-Man and the Wasp and then we were told, 'Hey you guys need to put a line in there about Hope [Evangeline Lilly] losing her cat,' at some point, because they were trying to set up something in Endgame. In Endgame, a rat crawls in the van and sets up the Quantum Tunnel and that's how Scott gets ejected. I'm guessing maybe it was going to be Hope's cat, who was stuck in the Quantum Realm, somehow comes out. But I'm totally guessing, I have no idea.
So, theoretically, Goose could've had company as a badass hero cat in the MCU -- although in Goose's case "cat" is really Flerken. Oh, and speaking of Evangeline Lilly, she wasn't aware of her character's role in the movie's connection to Avengers: Infinity War. This wouldn't be the first (and won't be the last) time where Marvel keeps important information from their stars.
Erik Sommers chimed in, saying:
There was something that was going to happen with her cat, 'so you have to put this cat in.' That was just something that was on the board and we were going to do. After a couple of months, then it was, 'No, we've moved on. We're going to do this other thing so don't worry about the cat anymore.'
If you haven't seen Avengers: Endgame and want to know what we're talking about, get on it. The film probably won't be in theaters for much longer.
